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There is a Liberal bias in American Universities, and in some places, including many of the most prominent universities in the country, an extreme Left Wing bias. If you find this hard to believe, the first thing you need to accept is that college isn’t what it used to be 5 years ago.In a few cases, there is a fair explanation for why this could naturally happen. One is the nature of the conservative motivations for education from those on the left. For most conservatives, college is a time to gain skills necessary for employment. While most professors will admit that their conservative students perform just as well as their liberal counterparts and often better, many of the fields they enter into do not require more than a four year degree. Consider Business or Law Enforcement. With many liberals, the fields they are seeking are academic and require much more study. This, I have found, to be a perfectly logical and acceptable explanation for why more students of a liberal persuasion would pursue a life in academia and thereby shift the balance.My friend Ian McCullough, a liberal, also provides a few very good reasons in his answer for why such a liberal lean could naturally and with absolutely no malice or nefarious schemes to bias the system. There are others as well, but with credit to my friends on the left who acknowledge the liberal bias, this doesn’t go far enough to explain the real numbers being reported in the system, nor do they really acknowledge the gravity of the situation current college students are experiencing because of the extreme bias in the system.Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, did a study in 2014 measuring back over the last 25 years to measure the dispersion of left leaning professors to those of the right. What he found was staggering. In colleges, liberals have always been more embraced, at least since Abrams began his study. Beginning in the mid 90’s, however, conservatives and especially moderates have been replaced by more extreme liberal biases.Figure 1. Ideological Positions of Faculty in American Colleges and Universities: 1989 – 2014. Data courtesy of the Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, plotted by Sam Abrams.For certain parts of the country, this was far more pronounced. Abrams broke down the disparity geographically and saw that while liberals outnumbered their conservative counterparts throughout the nation in representation in institutions of higher learning, in places like the New England states, the disparity was as high as 28 to 1.28 to 1… Come on. There is simply no rational explanation for a 28 to 1 disparity that is innocent or lacking some major degree of intolerance to opposing points of view. Given that we are talking about the some of the world’s leading intellectual institutions, the level of intolerance that could have created a 28 to 1 disparity. Furthermore, given the outsized influence that these particular universities have over the educational system, it should bother people that they are so repressive towards differing points of view in their hiring practices.Another study Published in Econ Journal Watch, reviewed over 7,000 where they found that Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 12 to 1. Compare this to a 1968 study that put the Democrat-to-Republican contrast in history departments at 2.7 to 1. Furthermore, it broke it down by department, where economics was the most friendly to conservatives, at a ratio of only 4.5 liberal professors to every conservative. Another study resulted in only 7% to 11% of faculty members in social sciences and humanities are Republicans, according to surveys. At the extreme, the Econ Journal Watch found that History departments, where the leanings of your old High School teachers were long gone, had liberals outnumber conservatives by a 33 1/2-to-1 ratio. It was even shown within these departments that it was easier to find a Marxist than a Republican. Perhaps now it makes sense that mention of the Gulag Archipelago, Christian genocide in the Soviet Union, artificial famines in China under Mao, or why Communism killed over 100,000,000 people in the 20th century never seemed to make the syllabus, but man… those Americans with their economic imperialism and long history of oppression. Wow. Thank goodness for higher learning.This brings to mind the quote from one of the fathers of Conservative theory, something no one learns about in college, Edmund Burke.Honestly, how many people had no clue who originally said that, and honestly, how many people calling themselves educated have no clue who this man is? Chances are, you didn’t learn about him in college and if you know, you found it out on your own. That should be the first indicator that there is something wrong with this imbalance due to that bias.Some of the excuses being levied for this is that the college experience simply makes conservatives or moderates liberals, as if the institutional process civilizes them from their barbaric or neanderthal ways. Wow, is that arrogant. That certainly doesn’t explain the Burke thing, though. Others, that the filtering process for universities (their costly expense) filters out the poor and the uneducated, which is presumably where most conservatives hail from. Given how radically contradictory this is to the notion that conservatives are all rich and greedy, only interested in maintaining the status quo, I wonder how apologists can possibly rationalize the two competing views. A better (while still incorrect) explanation offered by the New York Times was that Conservatism has simply changed and that no one could bear it any longer, or at least, that it became intolerable to the academic environment.Again, this excuse fails a logical test. If such an evolution took place, then we would have seen some measurable change in the broader culture, but at the same time that the universities became stark and suddenly more left wing, the nation stayed exactly the same, as shown by this graph depicting the ideological positions of America.What the evidence shows is that while the United States has remained remarkably ideologically consistent, the universities have become extremely left/leaning, radically and disturbingly so in the New England states and particularly in the social sciences. So there really isn’t a good reason for 28 to 1. For that sort of dispearity to exist, much more powerful and far more far more complex reasons must exist for than the often levied and extraordinary condescending “because smart people are liberal,” and many of them, aren’t innocent or even accidental.Frankly, there was a few rational reasons for a left leaning influence in the universities, but that has compounded itself many times with those left leaning voices pulling more like themselves in and pushing out all the others on an institutional level. Specifically, the problem with the left wing, let’s call it what it is, radicalization of the universities is that draws from selection biases in the way professors are brought in to teach the “liberal” arts, humanities, and social sciences. Not all, but a fair enough proportion of the professors did not gain their credibility from their early academic fields, but through activism. Look, say whatever you like about activists and the need for them, but they don’t produce unbiased people willing to accept critical analysis that may invalidate the cause they’ve championed for years. Often, after whatever gains are made, they have few employment options beyond pursuing fields in politics or becoming professors of social sciences.A problem with people going into science fields who have an agenda? They don’t produce quality science. A scientist works toward discovery, with no real goal in mind other than to discover what is unknown. They aren’t there to prove a point. These activists turned professors, however, build careers around continuing their advocacy, whether intentionally or not. Rather than a simple quest for discovery and education, they are institutionally encouraged to be fixated on researching topics related to their personal connections to the issues. This has been called by one professor of Psychology, John Ruscio “me-search”. The problem here is that, rather than simply teaching what is needed to understand a fundamental course, or in discovering new relevant truths, courses become grounds for activists turned professors to continue their original work, often at the cost of the actual science in those fields.An example? Women’s studies. When you’ve built your work around decades of theory predicated on the narrative that women are institutionally repressed by society and source as proof for this evidence such as the “Wage Gap”, you really don’t want to deal with arguments that invalidate that data point central to your theory. However, when evidence turns up showing that simply taking the difference between the averages of all women and all men may not be a quality metric with which judge the entirety of American culture to be systemically sexist, we aren’t presented with that argument in the curriculum. Furthermore, saying that factors such as the number of women who choose to leave work to start families as compared to men across the society, the amount of time taken off by women, the fewer average hours worked by women, or the relative unwillingness of women to take on dangerous (and more often higher paying) jobs, or even simply the argument that men are more likely to ask for more money, aren’t taught either. Continuing on, when evidence such that the freer a society gets for women, as defined by the feminists themselves, such as we see in the nordic and other parts of Europe, we see more gender based delineation in the types of work that women choose to take on than those societies which are deemed less free for women, meaning that the freer women are to make their own choices, the more the supposed wage gap increases due to the jobs they choose. All this considered, it becomes clear that whatever wage gap that exists is due far more to the choices and freedoms these women have, than some systemic repression of a tyrannical patriarchy. In fact, when factoring for these choices, the wage gap narrows to almost nothing, and in fact, reverses in many liberal cities for young women without children. This argument really sucks if you’ve built a career proving the Patriarchy, so it’s little wonder that it isn’t thoroughly explored more by students of these professors.And it’s very difficult for professors to adapt to new information when they were not brought into the education via the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, but as activists who continue to believe they fighting for a cause. That’s why these arguments don’t appear in campuses open discussion. Instead, they are labeled “sexist” or that they are “creating a hostile environment for students” where they don’t feel “safe”, and any professor who does allows such discussion might find themselves in a punitive meeting with their school’s ethics and diversity officer.That isn’t hyperbolic, as a similar case to this example took place in Canada last month. At Wilfrid Laurier University, a teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was branded as “transphobic” and scolded by her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, during a meeting with the Ethics and Diversity Officer of Wilfrid Laurier following the supposed complaint from a student. Her crime? Showing a video of a debate taken from Canadian public television featuring one Canadian professor of Psychology, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Her true crime, however, wasn’t in showing the video, but failing to do so “critically”, making it known that she and the university don’t support his views. That is to say, her job was specifically to not be neutral, which was what she thought her job was supposed to be. During the reprimand, which her supervising professor communicated to her as a simple meeting, the university officials informed her that the video was “problematic” because Dr. Jordan Peterson was a “key member of the Alt-Right” and that he uses the website Patreon “made by the Alt-Right to fund hate speech”, and that by showing a video representing him neutrally she was “fostering an atmosphere of transphobia on the campus.” The reprimand even compared what she did to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler.”I can say this. I’ve followed Dr. Peterson very closely over the last year, and watched a lot of his videos. I’ve also written extensively on the Alt-Right, specifically in creating a book aimed at educating readers on understanding and dismantling their movement. That he would be compared to the Alt-Right is patently absurd. Then to say that representing one of his videos is the same as “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler,” is the sort of accusation which should see heads roll during more rational times. As an additional note, I’ve also used patreon for four years and can say that they have intentionally banned violators such as this campus tribunal has indicated, with most of their creators being creators of music videos and comics. Hardly the pipeline to hate speech described by the “campus diversity officer”. What Peterson is rather famous for is his fight against Canada’s recent Bill C-16, which mandates compelled speech for professors according to the guidelines of extreme left wing narrative board of inquiry over Canada’s education system.What seems clear is that, like at many other campuses, (see Duke LaCrosse Team) judgement was cast down based on the complaint of a single individual who was offended and when that offense met with a far left Progressive narrative of the campus,was acted upon without any investigation other than what the professor had heard through a very biased grapevine, and used to create a repressive, even fearful atmosphere for people who did nothing wrong.What seems equally questionable is the creep of the Humanities into the hard Sciences. By this, I’m referring to Feminist Biology, which isn’t the biology of women, but a program at the University of Wisconsin where the field is viewed through the lens of feminism and the female perspective. To quote one professor, it exists because “in order to do science well, we can’t ignore the ideas and research of people who just so happen to not be male,” though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that men need to be censored from the field, given that women have far surpassed men at earning Biology degrees and saying that they aren’t respected in the field ignores how many of them are being given Nobel Prizes for their contributions. Historically, men dominate the sciences, but if any quality Biology program is teaching current Biology, then I don’t see how they would be guilty of teaching about only men. Given also that such a program would specifically filter out the “ideas and research of people who happen to be male”, are not these feminist biology student being denied the foundational work of the first scientists in the field that the world of later male or female scientists are built on? The logic of the class is what it is, but what is perhaps most troubling is that this program wasn’t governed by the Biology Department of Wisconsin University, but under the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. To say nothing else, I should think that hard scientists would find that concerning.This creep can be felt in other ways to students, where more and more of their bloated transcripts are being filled with courses outside their chosen fields to “gain a deeper appreciation in the Humanities”, which is itself becoming more radicalized. Perhaps a little emphasis in economics could have explained the consequences of their rising student loan debt due to these additional classes and given them an appreciation for how hard paying it off will be if you only ever paid attention in humanities courses.Moving on, conservatives also note the problems inherent in the system by way of how professors and graduate students are promoted and advance in their careers, by means of peer-review publications. The process of peer review is fraught with controversy from scientists questioning if the system is valid for the progress of scientific discovery and acceptability, from bias to outright censorship. It can range from committees made of department heads giving the ten ton hammer to articles and manuscripts they find objectionable on any number of issues to the simple process of a journal editor sending an article to a few friends to see if they like it, where two thumbs up mean it gets published and a rejection sends the piece to the Void of Lost and Forgotten Knowledge.There are many unhappy with the system of peer review, so does this process result in censorship for or a lack of advancement for conservatives specifically? According to numerous professors, yes it does.The following was submitted by a conservative professor, Matthew Woessner, whose main work argues against the notion of that conservative views are repressed in the colleges, but here, he must contend the peer-review process, coupled with the extreme diversity problem among educators, makes it difficult for conservatives to find opportunities for advancement.The more pernicious problem occurs when right-leaning scholars submit their work for blind review with prestigious publishers or in peer-reviewed journals. Even if we presume that most journal referees are sincerely trying to judge a work based on its scholarly merits rather than its social or political implications, a jury pool dominated by left-leaning scholars will almost certainly subject right-leaning papers to greater scrutiny, highlighting their methodological shortcomings and challenging their overall conclusions. If the academic universe were evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the unconscious tendency to challenge dissenting viewpoints would hamper the publication of conservative and liberal work at roughly the same rate. However, with a vast majority of academics falling on the left side of the political spectrum, this is an issue that, in all probability, tends to hamper the publication of conservative-leaning ideas. Thus, professors whose political instincts are right of center must either focus on non-ideological scholarly questions or endure a special degree of scrutiny as they seek to secure publication of their ideas.Richard Vatz, professor of rhetoric and communication at Towson University was less forgiving.For many decades, there has been a stunning — and manifestly appalling — general prejudice against conservatives in higher education, evidenced by curtailments on their academic freedom and freedom of speech.It is difficult for conservatives to get hired, and once hired, it is difficult for them to get promotion and tenure — particularly in the humanities and social sciences, wherein liberal orthodoxy rules.This has resulted in fewer conservatives finding their way into academe as a profession, which liberals disingenuously claim is the result of universities having limited economic attraction for those on the right, not as a result of unfair practices.He continued in a follow-up to his original piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education - Anti-Conservative Bias in Academe is Real.Furthermore, over the past five years, outright repression of conservative views has increased to the point of direct hostility against professors and students who harbor them. A book Passing on the Right documented the growing tension and fear many conservatives have in academia. It notes that belief in campus discrimination against conservatives is widespread: 81% of conservative professors say they feel it, and even 30% of liberal professors agree that conservatives face a hostile ideological workplace. The book also lists numerous accounts brought forward to show that this radicalizing process is getting worse and having expressed impacts on the careers of conservative professors and the orthodoxy being pushed to students. Among the examples given were a professor accused of training his students to be Nazis after defending the post-9/11 War on Terror where his door was covered with swastikas, a Jewish historian calling for political diversity on a panel on reparations being called a racist and a Nazi by his colleagues, the ostracism of one professor who accepted a job in the Bush administration by colleagues, and even pro-life sentiment at a Catholic college being viewed as “shocking” and “venomous.”Continuing on, the book details requests for academics seeking to do research on topics controversial or challenging to left -wing narratives, such as reverse discrimination against whites and/or men facing rejection for explicitly political reasons with reaction such as: “The findings could set Affirmative Action back 20 years if it came out that women were asked to interview more often for managerial positions than men with a stronger vitae.” If all this weren’t enough, the book also notes one study finding sociologists were willing to give preferential treatment in offering a job to a communist over a Republican.Altogether, this process seems to have the impact of further increasing the disparity between right and left on college campuses. Most importantly, in recent year, this disparity has manifest as outright intolerance of conservative views and students by extremists allowed to rise through the academic system unchallenged. Noteworthy examples include those gathered by Sankar Srinivasan whereby A professor called students ‘future dead cops.’, another writing reports that Having 'white nuclear family' promotes white supremacy, or when Drexel was forced to suspend a professor after hateful tweets following the Las Vegas shooting. His exact words were “All I want for Christmas is a White Genocide” and “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid.” An important note, Drexel didn’t suspend him as a form of disciplinary action but because “he was receiving threats,” and that “his and the student’s safety was their top priority.”I’ll make an opinion statement here, Drexel would make a clearer statement that their student’s safety mattered if they fired the professor calling for a majority of them to be murdered. Again, that’s just my opinion.Then, of course, we have the professor who let her class protest Trump instead of taking the final exam and the one who offered extra credit to students who protest against President Trump. No bias here, folks. More recently, there was the masked professor in California who attacked pro-Trump protests with a bike lock (Former professor suspected in Berkeley bike-lock attack enters plea in Oakland court). Wonder what his classes were like. And just this last month, a student newspaper which published the article 'Your [white] DNA is an abomination'.“When I think of all the white people I have ever encountered - whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friend, police officers, et cetera - there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider ‘decent,’” student author Rudy Martinez writes in the University Star.Without much biological explanation, Martinez informs white readers, “You were not born white. You became white… You don’t give a damn.” Later in his rant, he calls the police “fascist foot soldiers” and says a “white supremacist inhabits the White House.”How a student at a major American university, in Texas no less, could come to such conclusions as rational and acceptable to print is the real heart of the matter.Liberals in higher education are so over represented, and conservative voices so marginalized in both hiring and promotion practices, that the theories, ideas, and norms of an ever more left-leaning academia are completely and totally unchecked by dissenting arguments. It is, in fact, reaching a tipping point to the where the very idea of criticism toward these theories and ideas is itself being outlawed on campuses. With the propagation of campus speech codes, to censur both student and professor curriculum, the encouragement of campus courts falsely accusing students of all manner of criminal and non-criminal acts that destroy their future prospects of a career, the acceptance of safe-space mentalities to free students from critical thought and ideas that challenge their orthodoxy, the dogmatic enforcement of political correctness in lectures by campus “ethics and diversity” officers, the banning of conservative lecturers paid for by student donation from entering the campus, and finally the outright tolerance of hate speech such as saying that all Republicans are Nazis and that white DNA is an abomination, liberal schools have lost the right to call themselves institutions of higher learning.They have for too long accepted processes which encourage an ever present left-word shift, to the point that there was no one left to be critical of their ever more apparent radicalization.In the best case scenario, the environment of college campuses is producing a generation of students who are completely unaware of views which contradict mainline Progressive ideology, making them weaker thinkers incapable of dealing with conflicting views, having never experienced their own views challenged in the institution specifically created to do so. This hurts liberal students far more, as the conservative students must grapple with being challenged with every lecture, and those who remain steadfast are empowered with the rationale for their beliefs honest critical analysis offers them, but which is denied to their liberal students. In the worst case, the colleges are evolving into toxic grounds for free thought and becoming a bedrock of poorly vetting theory which borders now on orthodoxy, one which is taken as fact without criticism, and is being used to prop up hateful movements under the guise of their own victimhood.All that to say, well done young lady.Thank you for reading. If you liked this answer, please upvote and follow The War Elephant. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Support Page to learn how. All donations greatly appreciated!

By - SEOSEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single timeSEO In One DaySEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms.Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing.SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. It’s also something that has a lot of faux veneer around it. Consultants want to make it seem incredibly difficult so that they can charge you a lot, but I'll show you exactly how to do it, step by step, and you'll win.How Google Works In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google.First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked.The Early Days of GoogleThe idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them.They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them.Google TodayGoogle works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar.All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required.Gaming the SystemGoogle is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms.If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things.Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future.On-Page SEOThe first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused.Keyword Research The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary.The Long TailThere’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the Y axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller.Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail.In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left.Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort.The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”Finding the Long TailIn order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.The process looks like this:Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywordsExport those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic levelSearch for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficultyDon’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months).Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword GeneratingIn this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process.So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:Growth hackingGrowth marketingInternet marketingGrowth hacking guideGrowth hacking bookBook about growth hackingWhat is growth hackingGrowth hacking instructionsThat’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out The Bulk Keyword Tool. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with.Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI.Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500.Step 2: Traffic EstimatingNow that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while.You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step.Google Keyword PlannerThe Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track.You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past.Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data.Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there.Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank.Go to service for competitors research, shows organic and Ads keywords for any site or domain and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw.As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after.Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty<30:40<100:40–50<1000:50–701000+:70+Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows.Exact MatchOne important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “exact match” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall.Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit.Here are mine:growth hacking strategiesgrowth hacking techniquesgrowth hacking 101growth hacking instagramgrowth hacking twitterMine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.Keyword TrendsUnfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.First, let’s use Google Trends to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb.The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.Manual Keyword Difficulty AnalysisIn order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list.This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07.Now when you search, you’ll see something like this:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X.SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexedPage Links: The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples)URL Links: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URLAge: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet ArchiveTraffic: A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URLLooking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes.If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both.Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle.Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E.Entrepreneur - Start, run and grow your business. is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for Entrepreneur - Start, run and grow your business. — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA.Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while.https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90.Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton.But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.”Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily.So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links.(Note: After doing this a few more times I learned that I could probably get Austen Allred’s Blog toward the top of "growth hacking press," so I changed the on-page optimization of one of those pages to focus on that keyword, and we'll see how it goes.On-Page SEONow that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you.Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.On-Page SEO Checklist☐ Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag☐ Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words)☐ The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended)☐ Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag)☐ If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them☐ Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword☐ Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description)☐ There is at least 300 words of text on the page☐ Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage)☐ Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy☐ Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page☐ Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5%☐ The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page)☐ The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your siteIf you have all of that in place you should be pretty well set from an on-page perspective. You’ll likely be the best-optimized page for your chosen keyword unless you’re in a very competitive space.All we have left now is off-page optimization.Off-Page SEOOff-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. (Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing.)Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries.Link JuiceSEOs have a weird way to describe this voting process; they call it “link juice.” If an authoritative site, we’ll say Wikipedia for example, links to you, they’re passing you “link juice.”But link juice doesn’t only work site to site — if your homepage is very authoritative and it links off to other pages on your site, it passes link juice as well. For this reason our link structure becomes very important.Checking Link JuiceThere are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages.Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly.That said, you can check at least a sample of Google’s index in the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Once you navigate to your site, In the left-hand side select “Search Traffic” then “Links to your site.” There’s a debate raging over whether or not this actually shows you all of the links Google knows about (I’m 99% convinced it’s only a sample), but it’s at least a representative sample.To see all of your links, click on “More” under “Who links to you the most” then “Download this table.” This, again, seems to only download a sample of what Google knows about. You can also select “Download latest links” which provides more recent links than the other option.Unfortunately this doesn’t let us see much a to the value of the links, nor does it show us links that have dropped or where those links are from.To use those there are a wide variety of tools: If you have a budget I’d go with Competitor Research Tools & SEO Backlink Checker as they have the biggest index, followed by Moz’s Open Site Explorer (most of the data you can get with a free account, if not then it’s slightly cheaper than ahrefs), and finally SEMrush, which is free for most purposes we need. MajesticSEO uses a combination of “trust flow” and “citation flow” which also works fairly well to give you an idea as to the overall health and number of links pointing to your site.All of these use different internal metrics to determine the “authority” of a link, but using them to compare apples to apples can be beneficial.Link StructureHTML links look something like this:<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a>Where http://www.somesite.com is the place the link directs you to, the title is largely a remnant of time gone by, and the linked text — think the words that are blue and you click on — is called the “anchor text.”In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters.Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible. External linking (from other sites) shouldn’t be very heavily optimized for anchor text. If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text Google can throw a red flag, assuming that you’re doing something fishy.If you’re ever creating links (like we’ll show you in the future) I only ever use something generic like the site name, “here” or the full URL.Internal StructureGenerally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure.Some say the ideal link structure for a site is something like this:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii.That’s close, but it gets a couple things wrong. First, you’ll never have a structure that organized, and second, in an ideal world every page would link to every other page on its same level. This can easily be done with a footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages. That allows you to specify anchor text, and pass link juice freely from page to page.Unfortunately it’s impossible to draw such a web without it becoming a mess, so you’ll just have to imagine what that actually looks like.We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site.Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia###Most of SEO at this point is now managing stuff that can go wrong. There is a lot of that, but we’ll go over what will cover 99% of needs, and you can Google if there’s something really crazy.Robots.txtAlmost every site has a page at http://url.com/robots.txt — even google has one.This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and not to crawl. Most are pretty good about listening, except the Bingbot, which pretty much does whatever it wants no matter what you tell it. (I’m mostly kidding.)If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a login page you don’t want indexed, a landing page, etc.) you can just “disallow” it in your robots.txt by saying disallow: /somepage.If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages.Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules.DisavowGoogle will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen.In the case that this does happen, however, you can “Disavow” links in the Search Console, which is pretty much saying, “Hey Google, don’t count this one.” I hope you’ll never have to use it, but if you hire (or have hired) a bad SEO or are being attacked by a competitor, that is how you combat it.NofollowA link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this:<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>.If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else.RedirectsIf you’re going to change a URL, but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice.Importantly, Google views www.austenallred.com and Austen Allred’s Blog as different sites. So decide on one, and redirect all of one type to the other.Canonical URLsIf you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”https://www.someurl.com/somepage”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.”And with that, we’re ready to build our first links.Link BuildingLink building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt.The best way to build links is to not build links. I’ve worked for companies in the past that don’t have to ask for them, they just flow in from press, customer blogs, their awesome blog posts, etc. If this is an option (and we’ll go over a couple of ways to make it more likely) you’re in a great place.If not, at least in the beginning, we’re going to manually create just a few.We’re going to create them in legitimate ways and not hire somebody in India to do so. That is a recipe for disaster, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen that take down a site.Web 2.0s The easiest way to build high quality links are what SEOs call “web 2.0s.” That’s just a way to say “social sites” or sites that let you post stuff. Now tweeting a link into the abyss won’t do you anything, but profiles, status pages, etc. do carry some weight. And if they come from a popular domain that counts as a link.Some of the easiest are:Twitter (in your bio)Github (the readme of a repo)YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views)Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog)Blogger (same here)TumblrUpvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, The Smartest Inbound Marketing Community Online | Inbound.org, Reddit, etc.)If nothing else you can start there and get a half dozen to a dozen links. There are always big lists of “web 2.0s” you can find online, but keep in mind if you’re going to build something out on a blogging platform you’re going to have to really build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way.We generally keep a bigger list of Web 2.0s here. Some may be out of date, but you should probably only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s anyway.Expired DomainsAnother way to get link juice is by purchasing an expired domain. This is more difficult to do, but there are a lot of options such as Expired Domains | Daily Updated Domain Lists for 364 TLDs. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.)You’ll want to purchase a domain that has expired and restore it as closely as you can to its original form using an archive. These sites likely have some link juice to pass on and you can pass it to yourself.Link IntersectionAnother way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well.Now that we have a few basic links flowing, we’re going to work on some strategies that will send continual links and press, eventually getting to a point where we don’t have to build any more links.Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority SiteAwesome — you have a site that converts well, your SEO is in place, ready for you to drive traffic. Now what?As you’re probably learned at this point, a site that converts very well but has no traffic flowing to it still converts zero traffic.We’re going to fix that.This section takes a lot of time and effort, and in the beginning you’ll likely wonder if you’re doing anything at all. Remember that class in college that is so difficult it’s the point where most people give up, effectively weeding out the people who aren’t ready to major in a specific subject?Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking.Take a Long-Term View The reason so many people stumble on this step is the same reason people stumble on so many steps that take a little effort under time — losing weight, investing in a 401(k), etc. In the beginning you’re going to have a little seedling of traffic, and you’ll be looking up to those who have giant oak trees, thinking, “I must be doing something wrong.” You’re not doing anything wrong. The traffic starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood.But don’t worry if you’re a startup. Our goal is to get enough traffic that continuing to do this effort will be sustainable (meaning we won’t die before we start to see the rewards), but at the same time we’re building equity in the Internet.The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river.Future chapters will go into depth on the networks we need to drive traffic from, so in this chapter we’re going to focus on traffic that’s network-agnostic. Traffic that we can’t get by tapping any specific network.Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits per day, though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day?Monitoring AlertsTo start we’re going to use the keywords we found in the SEO chapter, and inject ourselves (and our company) into the conversation wherever it’s taking place.To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle.BuzzBundle This software lets us do a few things:Constantly monitor all mentions of a specific topic, competitor, or keyword across multiple locations on the Internet (from Facebook groups to Quora questions to blog posts) where comments are available Allow us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or companyDisclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen This step takes thought, effort, and a real human who understands what they’re typing. I don’t often say this, but you cannot effectively automate this step without it becoming spammy. If you’re trying to replicate the automated SEO spam you’ve seen on various blogs and sites this will probably work, but you’ll get banned, your clickthrough will be a fraction of what it could be, and you’ll be bannedProductive CommentingWe’re not going to fire up some awful software to drop spun mentions of garbage onto various comment sections online hoping that brings us SEO traffic. Our comments must do two things:Be contextual. We are only going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and only mention our company when it naturally fits inContribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your commentIf you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Second, people will respect your company because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute.And with that disclaimer, we’ll move on to the nitty gritty of how this is done. Let’s fire up BuzzBundle and get to work.Accounts and PersonasThe first thing you’ll want to do in BuzzBundle is go to Accounts -> Add new accounts. This is the starting point for everything we’ll do, as we need accounts to comment.One thing you’ll notice about BuzzBundle is that it lets you use multiple accounts. I find it beneficial to think from multiple perspectives and therefore multiple points of view, but I don’t want to go too far overboard and be spammy.I’d recommend doing something simple — create 2–3 personas, each of whom you identify with (or are you), and enter them into your BuzzBundle accounts.Personally I don’t even change my name, I just use a different one (eg. Austen J. Allred vs. Austen Allred) or use a few photos, just so it isn’t literally the same name and same photo blanketing the Internet.DisqusDisqus is a comment system used all over the place, and it carries some caveates. Disqus will ban you if you use the same link in every post, so there are two workarounds:Use a lot of different accounts, rotating IPs or using a proxy every two days or so Use your site URL as your “display name”Both of these work, but the second one is much easier in my view.UTM ParametersUsing links with our UTM parameters here will be very beneficial. We’ll be able to track traffic back to each individual blog or site, and if necessary double down on the ones that are driving traffic.Link Shorteners If you ever start to run into problems with getting your link posted, it may be useful to use a few link shorteners or some 301 redirects.To keep it simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as URL Shortener and Link Management Platform, or if you want to spend a little more time you can set up your own site and 301 the traffic from a certain page to your money site.

The following explanation is a brief summary of a few papers and other sources that explain various parts of the crisis. This is not a full analytical treatment, but I believe that it's more complete than what I've read in most news outlets. The articles by Lane (2012) and De Grauwe (2012) that are linked to in the bibliography are far more complete than this explanation and they're quite accesible for people with little to no economics background. All credit goes Massimo Guliodori ( http://www1.fee.uva.nl/toe/giuliodori.shtm) for compiling these papers as part of the Monetary and Fiscal Policy course at the University of Amsterdam. For the record, I am an undergraduate economics student. I am not a researcher, I have no affiliation with the University of Amsterdam (other than studying there) and I am by no means an expert. I encourage everyone to read the referenced literature. Do not just take my word for it.The answer is divided into 3 sections. The first section looks at the agreements that were made prior to the creation of the European Monetary Union. The second section concerns itself with risk factors that were present before the banking crisis. The final section looks at how the banking crisis became a sovereign debt crisis.1. The creation of the European Monetary Union.The Maastricht treaty [1]The Maastricht treaty was signed on the 7th of February, 1992 and went into effect on November 1st 1993. One of its goals was to "establish economic and monetary union"[1]. The objectives were to create a single currency and to ensure price stability. The creation of the monetary union (MU) consists of three steps: first there's liberalisation of capital movement, next there's convergence of economic policies, and finally there is the establishment of the European Central Bank and a single currency. The Maastricht Treaty also established that the Central Bank is independent of national and community political authorities. This is important because politicians may form goals that harm the system. For instance, during elections a politician may exercise policy that reduces unemployment below the natural level. However, such a policy can lead to increases in inflation and subsequent welfare loss. The ECB sticks to keeping inflation at its target level and doesn't take directions from politicians.Stability and Growth Pact[2]The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) was proposed by German finance minister Theo Waigel in the mid 1990's. Its purpose was to safeguard fiscal discipline in the European Monetary Union. The three most important takeaways from the SGP are:Countries are permitted to have a budget deficit that is at most 3% of their GDP. That is, the difference between what a government spends and what it receives (tax revenues) should be no more than 3% of GDP.[3]Countries are permitted to have an outstanding debt-to-GDP ratio of no more than 60%. [3]There is a "no bailout" clause. If a country can't meet its debt obligations, it defaults. [3]The SGP has been criticised. The above demands do not account for business cycles, meaning that if there's an economic slump and the government decides to boost the economy and temporary run a slightly larger deficit, they are punished. There's new legislation underway that deals with this. Another critique of the SGP is that by using a bit of clever accounting you can make it look as if you're hitting the marks outlined above, but you're really not. [4] This is what happened in Greece, who basically hid their debt. [5]The first countries to break the SGP requirements were Germany and France. The SGP was not enforced against them, probably because they were the countries that drafted the SGP and thus the decision was made to exempt them from this slip up.The SGP has been reformed in 2005 and 2011. [4]2. Pre-crisis risk factorsDivergence of competitiveness in the Eurozone [6]The divergence in competitiveness levels is one of the most remarkable imbalances in the EU. De Grauwe (2012) offers the following figure[6]:At the top we see countries such as Ireland, Spain, Italy and Greece. At the bottom we see countries such as Austria, Germany and France. Starting from a base level in 2000, this graph shows us is that over the years it has become relatively more expensive to produce in Greece when compared to Germany. The countries that are currently in trouble seem to be situated at the top of the graph.How is this a problem? For a country like Greece, it means that there's not a lot of demand for their products because the same products can be bought cheaper elsewhere. The result is that Greece becomes an importing nation rather than an exporting nation. When your imports exceed your exports (that is, you are running a current account deficit), you're paying more money than what you are earning on your exports. If all of a sudden there's a stop in funding markets, like a financial crisis, then you need to quickly close that deficit. You can't export more, because you're not competitive, so you have to start importing less. Doing so results in a contraction of output because you're hammering the importing industry. A contraction in output can also be viewed as a rise in unemployment levels. This is a very simplified version of what's actually going on and I encourage you to read Lane (2012) [3] pp. 52-53.So how do you deal with competitiveness issues? Basically your labor is too expensive, i.e. wages are too high. Cutting wages is one option but it's not a practical one due to "downward wage rigidity", people – and more importantly unions – do not like it when wages are lowered. Another option is to simply become more productive, you could think about higher levels of education in this context, but this is easier said than done. What countries do when they are not in a monetary union is that they devalue their currency. If you make your currency really cheap it makes the stuff you produce really cheap. Imagine the pre-Euro period: Greece could and would simply devalue the Drachma, which would make Greece's products relatively cheap and thus demand would be maintained. Italy had a similar tactic.But now they're in a monetary union. The exchange rate of the Euro is controlled by the ECB and the ECB is independent of local and community politics. A Monetary Union can be seen as the most extreme form of pegging your exchange rate, i.e. you fix your exchange rate for good by accepting an outside monetary authority. Now countries like Greece are screwed with regards to productivity. In order for these countries to become competitive they need to resort to internal devaluation. They need to bring down wages and prices. But this calls for a recession. Recessions make the markets nervous as investors see the economic conditions in a country deteriorate. If a financial shock (banking crisis) hits a country when it's going through such a fragile economic period, a country can find itself in deep trouble.Debt levels [3]Figure taken from Lane (2012) [3].We can see that there's quite a bit of difference between our usual suspects and the countries that have performed relatively well when it comes to their public debt-to-GDP ratios. Lane (2012) provides the following analysis. Italy and Greece have had debt-to-GDP ratios of over 90% since the early 90's. They never hit the 60% mark as required. Ireland, Portugal, and Spain achieved declines in debt in the 90's and while Portugal's debt started to climb since 2000, Ireland and Spain actually pushed their debt down. In fact between 2002-2007 Germany and France had higher debt ratios. Germany and France used to have debt ratios in the 90's that were around the 60% mark (I believe that's how they set the requirements, along with the 3% deficit mark.)But obviously debt isn't the only explanation for the crisis. Greece and Italy were in deep trouble in terms of debt, but Spain was doing fine. Ireland seemed to have been doing fine. So there has to be more to it than just debt.Overlevered banksBanks are huge. Bank assets are bigger than the economies of the countries in which they reside. So when a financial crisis hits and banks are suddenly in trouble, pulling with them a large part of the public (businesses and households), the country decides to step in and bail out the banks. Why? Because they're so big that if you let them fail you're going to wreck the nation (this is obviously being debated in some circles).From the above figure we can see that in 2007 banks issued more credit than what some countries were able to produce in terms of output. In the most extreme case, Ireland, the loans added up to 184.3% of GDP.Bank nonperforming loans to total gross loans (%)This figure shows how the amount of bad debt increased in the wake of the financial crisis. Ireland, Greece and Italy are up there. Notice the dramatic rise in bad loans in Ireland.Banking assets as percentage of GDP[7](click for a larger picture)Another chart proving that banks are huge. One of my professors maintains that this was the biggest risk factor contributing to the financial crisis turning into a sovereign debt crisis. I think you understand the point of this by now, if a government has to bail out a sector that is so much larger than what that country produces then it's going to be painful, even if it's just a partial bailout.The 2003-2007 Boom and failure to tighten fiscal policy. [3]The disparities in terms of banks size and differences in productive (and thus current account imbalances) were huge in the 2003-2007 period. According to Lane there is still no complete explanation of why this happened but it seems to be tightly linked with the securitization boom in the US. The low interest rates and massive lending weren't coming from governments but from the private sector. Households and firms (and banks) were piling up (toxic) assets.The "outsider" countries, by which I mean the countries that aren't considered to be the core EU countries like Germany and France, but the peripheral countries like Italy, Spain, Greece and Ireland experienced much larger credit booms because now they had access to funds with their own currency. Instead of borrowing something in a foreign denomination such as the dollar and hoping that the exchange rate plays along nicely and doesn't destroy the value of their holdings they now had access to a very strong currency.Naturally you'd think that any sensible government is going to capitalize on such a boom and raise taxes in order to gain some reserves for when this business cycle inevitably starts to go south. Guess what, they failed to do that. They failed to use proper analytical frameworks to judge economic conditions. They failed to capitalize on higher revenue streams in order to get ready for a future economic downturn.3. Crisis hits: 2008 and onwards. [3]When the crisis hit the initial response was to deal with the financial instability that arose, there weren't any big concerns about sovereign debt. European banks were exposed to a lot of US asset backed securities (mortgages) that lost their value after the housing market in the US collapsed. This caused bank balance sheets to severely deteriorate. Subsequently banks stopped lending money to each other. When banks stop lending money to each other they really get into trouble. The banking crisis hit the system in an asymmetric fashion. Investors, now wary of risks, first started to pull away from international capital and securing their funds at home. The first country to suffer from this was Ireland, their financial system relies on short-term international credit and when credit froze up the government had to provide a 2 year liability guarantee in 2008 (Lane, 2012).The credit crisis furthermore caused a sharp reversal in the current account deficits described earlier and an end to the boom. Spain and Ireland suffered from the end of the credit boom because it hit their construction sectors very hard. Spain relied on a lot of real estate development during the growth period of '03-'07 and now that was all gone. Still the debt crisis hadn't really begun and the focus was more on stabilising the financial system. Banks valued sovereign bonds as a good investment alternative and thus demanded more debt, causing interest rates to remain calm.Things started to come apart in late 2009 as governments began to revise their deficit-to-GDP ratios. These turned out to increase faster than expected. Shit really hit the fan when Greece came out with its revised deficit forecast in October 2009. Instead of 6%, 12.7% of GDP (Lane, 2012). I don't know what exactly happened to Greece in the years prior to the crisis, but from what I've understood they used a bit of clever accounting to hide the mess that they were in. Greece was in a really bad state and very vulnerable. Everything blew up in their face and they became the poster child of the crisis. The new government just went "Hey… it's not our fault, the last guys were assholes." Not only did this shock the markets, but it also set up a political premise that the crisis was the fault of countries such as Greece even though the system was unstable prior to the crisis. Of course Greek bonds were sold and Greece's interest rate rose and rose. If a country's interest rate rises sufficiently, it's basically shut out of the bond market because the debt is going to grow faster than the economy and the country is never capable of repaying its debt.Figure from Lane showing divergence of interest rates:I'm not going to into the measures that were undertaken to rescue these countries as its not fundamental to the question (although I encourage you to read Lane, it's really accessible to non-economists), but here's one of the things you should understand about debt. A part of a country's debt burden is reflected in its interest rates. If the interest rates go up, the country has to pay back more debt in the future. So, when a country gets into serious trouble because it has high debt levels to begin with, the markets start to worry. When the markets worry, they sell, when they sell the interest rate rises and the debt burden goes up. This causes markets to worry even more and drive up the debt even more. Eventually the markets can push a country into default. A lot of what the ECB has been doing is basically showing that it has the cojones to keep buying nasty assets in order to calm down the markets.A note on dealing with shocks: Independent country vs Monetary Union [6]Let me show you 2 charts from De Grauwe (2012) [6].Riddle me this: Why is it that Spain's interest rate is higher than that of the UK even though the UK has a higher debt ratio? The UK appears to me more at risk of a potential default (keyword: appears) but the markets are worried more about Spain. Que Paso?When a country is independent and has its own central bank like the UK does (the Bank of England) it can deal with shocks in a different way than a country that has no control over its currency (like Spain and the rest of the EMU countries). Let me explain:UK scenarioImagine the UK is hit by a shock. Investors become anxious, lose confidence and start selling UK bonds. Investors are now left with Pounds, which they want to dump because – again – they don't trust the UK anymore. Dumping the pound causes the exchange rate of the Pound to depreciate. The price will drop until someone starts buying these pounds. The BoE buys these pounds and reinvests them back into the UK economy. Some of these pounds might go back into UK bonds, but some will be used to breathe life into the UK economy. The crux is that liquidity remains bottled up inside of the UK and markets can't pressure the UK into a default.Spanish scenarioSpain gets hit by a shock, like the real estate construction shock mentioned earlier. Investors panic and sell Spanish bonds. Now these investors are left with Euro's. Guess what, Spain doesn't have a central bank. No, instead investors take their Euro's and buy German bonds…or Dutch bonds…or French bonds…or whatever stable Euro asset they might find. Spain is basically bleeding money. Liquidity is leaving the country. Interest rates are driven up and up and the country can be forced into a default position. De Grauwe [6] has a more elaborate explanation, but this gets the basic point across.Additional flight to safetyIn August Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank said[8]:The governing council, within its mandate to maintain price stability over the medium term and in observance of its independence in determining monetary policy, may undertake outright open market operations of a size adequate to reach its objective. Furthermore the governing council will consider further non-standard monetary policy measures according to what is required to repair monetary policy transmission. In the coming weeks we will design the appropriate modalities for such policy measures.That's banking language for "We're not going to let the speculative bastards take us down and we will keep buying assets and injecting liquidity into the system until you all calm the hell down".That commitment in combination with the Spanish authorities showing the political will to go through painful cuts paid off: Spanish Bond Yields Drop to 8-Month Low.Some speculators have been scared off by these measures and have decided to reallocate their portfolios to include less risky debts, such as German debt.To summarizeThe Euro Crisis is the combination of irresponsible behaviour, poor fiscal policy by countries, mediocre European regulations that were never enforced to begin with, large shocks to the system in the form of a banking crisis and big underlying differences in terms of competitiveness and debt levels. Yes the banking crisis significantly contributed to the state of current affairs, but it's shortsighted to say that that was the only reason why all of this happened.For countries like Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal it was a combination of an economic shock and bad fiscal policy. The shock was so big that the countries couldn't handle it. What started off in the banking sector resonated throughout other parts of the economy such as the construction sector. The shock was so big that countries found themselves in huge debts trying to deal with that shock. Then the markets started to lose trust in these countries, driving up their interest rates which resulted in an inability to borrow on international capital markets. This meant that countries lost their liquidity status and had even more problems trying to tackle their debts. This in term agitated markets even more and thus a vicious cycle ensued. Subsequently countries started applying for bailouts.The reason why Greece has been turned into the poster boy of the crisis is because they screwed up in a royal fashion, even more so than the other "usual suspects" (Spain, Ireland etc.). They manipulated their acounts and withheld information. Eventually it turned out that they were in the worst shape. There are plenty of economists who think that Greece will have to default because no amount of support will save them. Secondly, there's also a political dimension in this whole scenario. Politicians from the northern countries (Germany, the Netherlands etc.) need to be able to justify these measures to their electorate. And the thing is, the north is paying for the trouble down below. Feldstein, who was critical of the Euro project before it even began wrote an article on what he thinks is going to happen with Greece[9]. I encourage you to read it.Economies are highly networked. German banks hold Greek debt, Greek banks hold bad securities, Spanish banks hold Greek debt etc. etc. Whenever something goes sour, it spills over into other countries. These network effects are significant.Research about the Euro Crisis is ongoing.References:[1] Treaty of Maastricht on European Union[2] Stability and Growth Pact[3] Lane, Philip R. (2012). The European Sovereign Debt Crisis (Free text) Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 26, Number 3—Pages 49–68[4] Stability and Growth Pact – Wikipedia[5] Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis[6] De Grauwe, P. (2011). A fragile Eurozone in search of a better governance. (PDF: http://www.esr.ie/vol43_1/01%20Grauwe.pdf)[7] http://www.openeurope.org.uk/Content/Documents/Pdfs/bankinguniontwohalves.pdf[8] Mario Draghi on the eurozone: in quotes - Telegraph[9] Feldstein, M. (2011). The Euro and European Economic Conditions. NBER Working Paper. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17617N.B. Feldstein has written a lot about the "Grexit" (Greek Exit), you can find his work here: http://www.nber.org/feldstein/