While European stocks hit depressing lows, most of Europe is still telling Greece to follow basic home economics. Spend less, save more, pay off your debts, then you can afford to invest and grow your assets. It’s such a simple and consistent concept in personal finance that few people on the lending side have stopped to consider whether or not it’s true for a country as well.

A few years ago, the New Yorker started saying that austerity is not a good way to rebuild an entire country’s economy. At the end of April, Paul Krugman repeated the message: Austerity will not and cannot save Greece. Both pieces outline that most proponents of austerity have failed to consider the large-scale, mass-effect issues that exist uniquely in Greece.

Not a Household:

Greece’s creditors have been pushing a very hard line on austerity measures since the outset of the crisis. A common English-language expression for handling an organization’s finances is to call them a “household”. This starting point is hard to use with Greece. If the US and the UK are households, those households have fairly young, employed earners, some younger mouths to feed, and a grandparent or two who require some care. Such a household just needs to keep up a healthy income and make sure not to spend so much that the grandparents and children go hungry.

Greece isn’t a household. Greece is a retirement home with a few unpaid orderlies. The older population has been retired for quite a while and isn’t very employable. Ask any 58-year-old man who hasn’t worked in 3 years what his odds are of getting a good job in a country with a booming economy. He’ll tell you that he would have to dedicate full-time hours for half a year toward getting a new job if they were laid off today. Now apply that to a country with a cripple, crumbling economy. The younger population is either unemployed or has expatriated to get work. When the ECB and IMF try telling Tsipras, Varoufakis, and Co., they are telling the people who run that retirement home that they can’t give those pensioners their food in order to pay back their debts.

At the end of last week, in less than an hour, Greece’s governmental representatives failed to reach any sort of agreement with their creditors. It can be easily assumed that this basic misunderstanding of Greece’s true macroeconomic predicament lies at the root of the short debate. Both parties are wrong in their hardline stances. They have voters to appease and appearances to keep up, but no voter will be happy with a Greek economic implosion of the Eurozone.

The Greek government has to solve a different problem that none their creditors believe exists. They have to get enough capital influx to employ the young who have stuck around and bring back those who have already left. Without any bread to win, Greece can’t be expected to have many breadwinners.