In need

What a world of mixed-up values and reprehensible morals. Where our Members of Parliament kick 12 bells out of vulnerable people but allow the extraordinarily wealthy to leap through tax loopholes designed to protect their already huge stash...  

This issue is not about so-called 'scroungers', who - aside from it being a vile, dehumanising term that should be beneath us - are few and far between. Let us not forget that the fraud disability rate is less than one per cent. No, the issue is the basic human needs that this Government is failing to take care of.

From an angry report on disability benefit in the Daily Mail. Yes, the Daily Mail. Indeed, that Daily Mail.

More too in these reports about poverty in the UK, from food banks, through child poverty, to blatantly exploitative loan sharks.

From my comfortable semi-retirement in my second home in Greece I look at both the countries that I have a stake in and wonder what sort of world is being created and whether the political elites have a clue about the consequences of their policies. Are they deluded? Or perhaps they just don't care.

American football

This footballer knows how to write to a politician about gay marriage.

I find it inconceivable that you are an elected official of Maryland's state government. Your vitriolic hatred and bigotry make me ashamed and disgusted to think that you are in any way responsible for shaping policy at any level.

It gets better.  How I wish that when I had written to my MP in the past about adult education I had thought to use the phrase, "Holy fucking shitballs".

Experts

What is the connection between female orgasms and climate change denial? This sounds like the start of a very dubious joke, but actually it isn't. The two were linked in my mind by a couple of very different articles that I read recently.

First up is a wonderfully savage review by Suzanne Moore of Naomi Wolf's new book about, what else, the vagina. There is a lot of malicious pleasure to be had in a stinking review of a book that probably deserves it. Moore set about putting the boot in in a way that would have been far more satisfying than any orgasm. She is particularly rude about Wolf's dipping into neuroscience, "more clueless than someone who has failed her chemistry GCSE but has two TED talks on her iPhone" (ouch!).  And continues,

Yet again we see neuroscience in the hands of the layperson being fused to very determinist ends. Thus neural pathways are formed, chemicals just do one thing, hormones rule. Actual scientists don't think so simplistically, however many rats they have tickled to orgasm.

So we are back in the morass caused by the misuse of misunderstood science; inexpertise leading to a simplistic, 'scientific' conclusion. It is a bad habit, trying to pick out bits of half-digested information to suit a predetermined theory and thereby claim some sort of scientific validity for it. The second article takes on the more serious issue of climate change denial and of a media tendency to abandon any requirement for a modicum of knowledge to help promote the mistrust of expertise by the inexpert. It is a very similar process.

Jay Griffiths writes

Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science. 

When it comes to this academic discipline, it seems that if you are a specialist in public sector food-poisoning surveillance or possess a zoology doctorate on sexual selection in pheasants, editors will seek your contrarian views more avidly than if you have qualifications in climate science and a lifetime's professional expertise. The press is further littered with climate "heretics" almost all of whom have academic backgrounds in history, literature, and the classics with a diploma in media studies. (All these examples are true.) One botanist trying to argue that glaciers were advancing took his data (described as simply false by the World Glacier Monitoring Service) from a former architect.

What these 'sceptics' have in common is the self-image of being enlightened heretics, a Galileo complex. The problem is that their heresy is only lightly adorned by learning. In fact, they are repeating well-worn clichés that have been long disposed of and, though they see themselves as rugged individualists, they are really conservative conformists promoting a vested interest.

So let's think a bit more about expertise. We have a popular image floating around of the lone maverick genius. It doesn't really work that way. A flash of individual insight often can start the process off, but the accumulation of evidence prior to that has already pointed the way. The development of knowledge is as much collective as it is individual. This is why peer review is important. It doesn't guarantee that you are right, but it does point out when you are talking bollocks. This isn't an example of the wisdom of crowds, but of collective expertise harnessed to a common purpose. And this is why scientific consensus is important.

Of course expertise does not confer infallibility. Experts get things wrong, often badly. But that doesn't mean that they are invariably wrong, or that non-experts are more likely to be right. I have always felt that there is no necessary correlation between a position in an organisational hierarchy and expertise, but again that isn't to say that we should give equal respect to those with a smattering of knowledge leavened with a vivid imagination, because they are somehow more 'authentic' or demotic.

I like the way Griffiths ends up

The author has fallen victim to the Galileo fallacy. Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

And what is more, Galileo was seeking to overturn dogma with data, research and observation. Climate change sceptics are trying to overturn data, research and observation with dogma.

In the meantime, here is an exasperated expert.

Against hysteria

This book looks interesting, one for my post-writing reading list. I have been troubled by the way in which a legitimate concern over jihadi movements has morphed into a general intellectual incoherence. Parts of the left have embraced an apologism for some unspeakable theocratic monsters for fear of being 'Islamophobic', whilst the far right has mobilised into 'football hooligans against Muslims'.  As for the rest, either an embarrassed and faintly patronising silence reigns or the attention rightly paid to Islamist organisations crowds out a broader anti-racism. This book seems to take the sensible line of looking at Muslim immigration in the context of the usual patterns of migration and assimilation, using good empirical evidence and discussing the external political pressures that they are facing.

I suppose it particularly struck home as I am currently re-reading the anarchist Rudolph Rocker's memoir, The London Years, about the organisation of Jewish immigrant labour, which also took place at a time of terrorism, or 'outrage' as it was then known. This was again associated in the popular imagination with foreign immigrants and agitators. History never provides exact parallells, but there are echoes of today's moral panics and political confusions to be found in the sweatshops of19th century London.

Here is a short video of the author discussing it.

And a review from Terry Glavin here.

5,614

A new world record entry for the Guinness Book of Records.  The largest number of people dancing in a single syrtaki in Volos tonight.

UPDATE

An amazing arial view (together with the arrival of the Argo) here.

Blue moon

The second full moon in any month is conventionally known as a blue moon and there will one tonight.

It's bad news for lovers of sardines and anchovies, they can't be caught on bright nights. Although the association with Manchester City may be unfortunate, Rogers and Hart's Blue Moon is still a classic. There are so many versions to choose from ...

Here's an early one - Belle Baker recorded in 1935:



This is another 1935 version by Greta Keller. Then there is the incomparable Billie Holiday. And here are some outstanding Jazz instrumental versions by Art Blakey and Stephane Grappelli.

But I am in Greece, so I have to finish with Haris Alexiou singing Panselinos.

Crisis time is here again

Not that it ever went away. Samaras has been begging for time to get some sort of growth in the Greek economy, but the need to maintain the Franco/German alliance now seems to be standing in the way of French support for a less insane economic policy. Both countries are now putting pressure on Greece.  Much of this pressure is played out as a piece of theatre that consists of the stern authorities demanding obedience from the recalcitrant Greek child.  This article is well worth reading as it unpicks the moral drama without denying the need for reform. The point it makes is that,

To suggest that Greece is in a constant struggle to meet the troika’s fiscal goals because of indifference rather than due to the deteriorating state of the economy or because of the political difficulty of passing unprecedented -- by eurozone standards -- austerity measures is pure subterfuge. 

Pointing out that austerity has most certainly been implemented by Greece, and at immense economic cost, the article continues by saying,

The structure of the Greek bailout ensured that nobody in the official sector has lost money and the creation of an escrow account earlier this year guarantees that everyone who has lent to Greece will be repaid. In fact, when one factors in the interest and lower borrowing costs countries like Germany have benefited from as a result of weakness in other areas of the eurozone, the bailouts have turned a tidy profit. If Greece is a bottomless pit, it is the first in the world to return the money thrown into it with interest.

And then we come to yet another conclusion that says that the Troika have got everything wrong,

A crisis that is eminently solvable is instead being tackled in such a perverse manner that it threatens to erode Europe’s very foundations ...Greece is essentially being asked to pull even more of the rug from under the feet of its teetering economy, and risk the fragile political balance in the country, to receive further loans, which will be used to pay back existing debt. As Nomura Research Institute’s chief economist Richard Koo, who argues that the eurozone is experiencing a balance sheet recession, put it in a recent note, “it is as though a team of doctors insisted on administering the standard treatment for one disease to a patient suffering from an entirely different disease about which they knew nothing.”

And still they are not listening.

Back to school

Especially for Glenn Greenwald and Simon Jenkins, here is a simple lesson in logic.

Hypocrisy: particularly foaming at the mouth accusations of.

Just because it is the pot that calls the kettle black, it doesn't mean that the kettle is not black. If indeed the kettle is black, it means that the pot is absolutely correct. 

Sundry thoughts

Eleni is very frail now. I visited our old neighbour on her trip to stay with her son. At 102 she is no longer mobile and can barely sit upright. But mentally she is a sharp as can be, refuses to take any medicines and can still roar with laughter, especially when I make up for my deficient Greek with mime. My donkey impersonation was especially impressive, if ineffective. This game of charades started with a guess at a rabbit and I gave up when we got to horse, much closer in size. It had to do. I have blogged about her before obliquely here, as well as here and here.

As I left, I pointed out to Eleni's daughter-in-law how her husband must have inherited the same genes for longevity. She looked to the skies and crossed herself in horror – 'Ach! Panagia mou!'

****

One of the problems with novels can sometimes be the awkward contrivance of the plot as it bends and twists to create a convenient and conclusive ending. There are ways to avoid this, but there are also genres that celebrate contrivance and make it integral to the art form. One such genre is farce and Michael Frayn has written a gem of one set in Greece, though not about it. Skios is a delight and has been long listed for the Booker prize. It is lovely to see something light hearted get some recognition. There is a profile of Frayn and the book here.

****

How about this for the plot of a farce?

An extradition request from Sweden for a man accused of sexual offences, including one count of rape, is finally granted after an exhaustive process of appeals. The wanted man then skips bail and claims political asylum to protect his right to free speech in the embassy of a country with a lousy reputation on free speech, because of the danger that he could be extradited to the USA from Sweden to face the death penalty, despite there being no extradition request and the fact that Swedish law will not permit the extradition of anyone who may be subject to the death penalty. In the meantime he gathers a range of celebrity supporters who either ignore the charges or excuse them ('bad sexual etiquette') and repeat all sorts of strange claims (including it being illegal not to wear a condom in Sweden, which makes me wonder how long it will be before the Swedish population dies out). Transformed into a celebrity victim of the new world order, he gives a balcony speech. Let's call it a drama of self-righteousness, self-pity and self-preservation.

No. Too far fetched.

There are some positives to come out of the affair. It has given an opportunity for an unpleasant individual to be ridiculed, confirms suspicions that there is not an excess of sanity out there and has given the Guardian the opportunity to once again provide a platform for more lunacy.

Meanwhile – here are some facts.

****

And all the while I get a visit from a stray cat that looks like Hitler.

More here

The aesthetics of oppression

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently from the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings. Clearly, none of the steps Putin promised to take toward instituting the rule of law have been taken. And his statement that this court will be objective and hand down a fair verdict is yet another deception of the entire country and the international community. 

Yekaterina Samutsevich

Read it all together with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina.

Free Pussy Riot.

Thirteen

I sometimes have conversations about Israel/Palestine, both online and face-to face, with younger people and they disturb me. Their support for Palestinian statehood, something I have long shared, can often be scarcely differentiated from an anti-Israel sentiment that simply assumes the inherent wickedness of the state. It isn't hatred; it is disdain. Above all, what worries me is their certainty. Doubt does not trouble them, nor do they think of Israelis as anything other than oppressors. Does it ever cross their mind that they are Jews, or that the history of the conflict is inseparable from Jewish history and experience? I don't think so. As a result, they carelessly leave an intellectual door ajar and sometimes I wonder what it is that seeps in through the crack from the room beyond.

And so I come to a remarkable series of thirteen posts by the poet George Szirtes about his sense of his own cultural inheritance. It will be well worth your time to read them all. Whenever I read his poetry, I get a feeling that each word is casting a shadow, dappled layers of meaning, which lays bare a moment in time. In the darkest corners of those shadows lurk the ghosts of the worst of the twentieth century. They are not his own experiences; they are a room that he has necessarily passed through. He wrote these posts to try and explain, "…my feelings about Israel, a country I have never visited, based on a religion I have never practised, and a culture I have never shared". And he shows precisely where those young people go wrong.

The metaphor George chooses is a yellow room, taken from a Chagall painting. It is atmospheric and enigmatic; an intimate, welcoming, refuge. Outside it there is an inescapable sense of unease. The only moment that jars is in his eighth post.

Exile 

Roughly similar number of Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs left or were expelled from their previous dwelling places in the 1948 period (c 800,000 Palestinians, c 700,000 Jews from Arab homelands). 

The problem here is not that it isn't true, there was a mass displacement of both peoples with all the pain that involved. But unlike the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, the experience was not symmetrical. Jews had a refuge to move to, one that they were now determined to defend. The Palestinians had nothing, only the camps, only exile. And so they had to invent their own refuge, a room of their own. For the older generation it was constructed from memories of their old homes, something real that they had known and for which they kept the keys and deeds as sacred icons. The younger generation moved in and decorated it with unreality. Palestine became an Eden; one that could be recovered because they had not fallen, they were pushed. It was not made of the mundane; it was a dreamland, a golden room. People kill and die readily for glorious fictions.

And this is the essence of the conflict. Two peoples have become deeply entwined in tragic histories. They have more in common than is often admitted and that is why I repeat the slogan whenever I can that to be pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli at the same time is not a contradiction. It is a necessity if we are to untangle these enmeshed tragedies. To practical minds, the two-state solution stands as the starting point for coexistence.

All of which brings me back to these perfectly decent young people and the ideologues who fill them with righteous ardour. It's odd, they never seem to mention the word Jew. Instead they use hopelessly inappropriate analogies – 'colonial settler state', 'apartheid state' and the like. Anything to avoid even thinking that they are talking about Jews and that this noble cause could have anything to do with Jewish people. There is a reason for that of course. We gentiles have a room too. It is part of our history and we don't want to think about it. If we do, it might dilute certainty with ambiguity. The room isn't yellow. Sometimes it is made out of rough planks, sometimes of cement and occasionally it is constructed from neatly dressed stone placed on a picturesque mound in a beautiful northern city. This room is part of our cultural inheritance and it is intrinsically tied up with Jews. It is the room in which we kill them. And so I think I know what bothers me. It is the smell seeping through that half closed door. I can recognise what it is now.

It's gas.

***
Follow these links to read all the posts in order: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13

Friday cat blogging

It is summer and stray cats can spot a mug a mile off.

One is very relaxed with modern technology.

Computer and cat in perfect harmony

The others are just relaxed

Reasons to be cheerful

1. Linda Grant is enjoying the Olympics:

What has happened to London is that, in the space of a few days, it has become filled with hordes of individuals and families who are happy. Who are delighted to be in London, delighted to watch their sport played the very best it can be played, delighted to wave a national flag with the enthusiasm that comes of knowing that, unlike our English football squad, we're actually going to win something. The last time so many people were enjoying themselves as much in London must have been VE Day.

2. Charlie Brooker is enjoying the Olympics:

So yes, thanks, Olympics, for confounding my inner cynic, and not being awful. And for, I suppose, on balance, I admit, I confess, in a whisper – actually being quite good.

3. Holiday makers are coming back to Greece to enjoy themselves - and they will:

Ordinary tourists who might have cancelled holidays when the debt-stricken country seemed close to economic meltdown, two months ago, now appear to have had a change of heart. Over the past few weeks bookings have rebounded to the point that industry insiders expect arrivals to be on a par with those of other peak years, hitting 16 million by the end of 2012.

4. The Daily Mail, once again, make themselves look stupid:

Down with the miserablist tendency!

Sporting class

Peter Wilby bemoans the fact that,

Only football, eschewed by many public schools because of its proletarian associations, remains almost entirely dominated by state school alumni at the top level.

Er, hasn't he heard of Rugby League then? The sport was founded as a specific response to the attempts by the Rugby Union to exclude working class players who were beginning to dominate the upper echelons of the game. I have posted in more detail on this before.

In many ways his article is a fine piece, but Rugby League is a classic example of the interweaving of social class with sport, which is historic, systemic and not solely the result of educational inequality. Ironic too that a working class sport with a strong Northern regional identity should escape the notice of a London-based left journalist writing about social exclusion and social exclusivity in British sporting life.

UPDATE

Much of his analysis (of state school failure, not private school facilities) seems to have fallen apart with a raft of gold medals over the weekend by, er, former state school pupils.  Read John Harris.

In memoriam

Another day in the death of liberal adult education. Hull's Centre for Lifelong Learning, where I spent nearly fourteen years of my working life, formally closed yesterday. It isn't alone. The slow eradication of a service has been almost silent. The press are not really interested, nor do they understand it. Only the millions for whom adult education was both an opportunity and a lifeline mourn.

Here is a story from the other side of the world.

He is one of South Africa's best loved musicians, has toured internationally and made an album that sold half a million copies. But for Sipho "Hotstix" Mabuse there was always something missing: an education.
Forty-four years after he dropped out of school, Mabuse has gone back to the classroom and passed the exams he missed.

Hotstix comments:

"The best empowerment you can give to people is to give them an education. Those who rule over the ignorant will rule in perpetuity."

Draw your own conclusions. I just feel sad.

Hotting up

From sceptic to proselytiser is a well-trodden path, but this one is a very inconvenient conversion for the dwindling band of climate change deniers.

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Richard Muller here publicising his views in the New York Times.  He is still pugnacious about over what he sees as alarmist claims (including the one about Himalayan glaciers that was withdrawn as an error a few years ago), but gets to the central problem in his conclusion.

I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

Of course any scientific debate was settled a very long time before his study was undertaken, so what he is really trying to say is that it is time for him to join the party - a little late maybe, but he has turned up. However, if he thinks that this will stop denialist campaigns then he is mistaken. The reason why is in his last sentence. 

Climate change 'skepticism' was never a scientific movement, it was always a political one. Its aim was not to promote scientific enquiry, it was to at least delay, or preferably stop, any corrective measures that could affect the economic interests of its major corporate funders. It attempted to do this through obfuscation. Look at Fox News or the Republican Party in the USA today and you will see that it has had some success. And it will keep up the pressure for as long as it can.

So what will the consequences be? On a less serious level at least Minda Berbeco can offer some consolation. She points out that higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will benefit the growth of cannabis.

In a carbon-rich world 100 years from now, when our environment is over-run with poison ivy and star thistle; where rising sea levels will displace millions of people causing natural disaster refugees; where warmer temperatures will increase epidemic risks and famines globally; I think we’ll be very glad that the cannabis plant is doing so well.  We’ll probably need it.

Maybe this is what the Exxon corporations of this world need to do. Forget oil, go into dope. There's money to be made.

Thanks to Stephen for the links

Being British

I love Greece, but as an outsider. It isn't the same as being part of somewhere. If I was going to say what I love about my own country, I could mention literature and music obviously, the scenery and the townscapes, though not the weather, and that would tell you nothing about what it is like. No, I would pick out a few other things instead. There is our glorious cosmopolitanism. Self-deprecation as a national sport is another; we find ourselves funny. Then there is irreverence, humour, satire, surrealism and, of course, sentimentality. And I have just described the London Olympics' opening ceremony.

It was different. A rural idyll destroyed by dark satanic mills; Blake and Shakespeare (Caliban not Richard II); workers and women on the march. The historian in me was pleased to see that though the WSPU colours were in evidence amongst the suffrage campaigners, the most prominent banners were those of the NUWSS. The Jarrow marchers make an appearance, the Windrush arrives, so do the Beatles, and then a centrepiece celebration of the National Health Service, which has to be saved from monsters drawn from children's literature by an army of flying Mary Poppins. And that was only the beginning. We moved on to the Sex Pistols accompanied by giant bouncing punks, James Bond and the Queen parachuting from a light aircraft, the London Symphony Orchestra featuring Mr Bean ... and ... and ... and ...  before Dizzee Rascal performed Bonkers. Quite.

It avoided being kitsch, which so many of these ceremonies are, pulling back from the brink just as you thought it was going to slip over the edge. It was rarely banal, was often wildly over the top, didn't take itself too seriously and was always supremely, utterly surreal. But then the sentimentality was beautifully understated  - Abide With Me was sung exquisitely by Emeli Sandé.

What impressed me most was that it was populist in the best meaning of the term. It was of and about the people. It celebrated them and their collective experiences, their work and, by the end, their ability to laugh and to party. And when the Olympic flame entered the arena, the guard of honour was made up of the construction workers who had built the stadium. I liked that.

Of course a particularly obnoxious type of Tory MP has gratifyingly ruined his career with his "leftie," "multicultural crap" tweets. Then again it didn't take long for another bit of pious carping to drop into my inbox from someone who would have preferred some sanctimonious agitprop. But that is not what an opening ceremony is for. Wait a minute, what is an opening ceremony for? Er ... Hold on a sec ... Oh well, if we are going to have one, why not something fun - and creative - and entertaining - and touching - and mad - like this. In short; art, popular art.

I'll end on sentimentality. It is a hot day, the cicadas are screeching, this isn't Britain, I feel like a little sentimentality. Here is Emeli Sandé's studio recording of Abide With Me. Listen, lie back, and think of England.

Being English

I was chatting in the lane outside the patio gate and my neighbour was complaining about the heat. I replied to the effect that, 'you are Greek, so of course you moan, but in England we don't see the sun and so when we come here we ...' and then I added an extravagant gesture of bliss; the wordless communication necessary when the command of language is deficient. Martin Amis put it much better in this interview about living in New York:

All I care about is the color of the sky. Have you spent time in England?

He is right - it is the brilliance of the light, the absence of the uniformity of grey, dull skies and the intoxicating, star-filled darkness of a warm night that I relish about being here.

And with the Olympics about to start, this also seemed spot on:

David Remnick said the English feel Schadenfreude about themselves—they delight in their own suffering, they take a sort of grim joy in that. 

The Olympics aren't my sporting cup of tea (to continue with the metaphor of Englishness) but friends of mine have been eagerly chasing tickets and are looking forward to the events with excitement. Meanwhile, those who would rather they turn out to be a failure are having a field day - they absolutely love G4S. There are also the usual contributions from those who hate sport and therefore think that it must be morally wrong to like it and that us sports fans have to be defective, or, even worse, pitiably deluded and unconsciously oppressed. Some leftists seem to cling to the hope that it will all go wrong and bring down the government, others just think that everything is deeply politically suspect. At least the gift for satire (as opposed to cynicism) is still alive and kicking everything within range:



The best anti-Olympic rant is Andrew Rawnsley's, simply because you can't fault his critique of the commercialisation, the costs and his argument that the supposed benefits are unlikely to materialise. He's right. Just ask Athens. Though his conclusion is impeccably cheery and utterly English in its final sentiment.

For all the blunders during the build-up, I have a hunch that the actual event will be largely successful. I hope so. Even an Olympiphobe doesn't want to give to the French the satisfaction of being able to crow that they would have done it so much better.

But for every cheerful sceptic, there is always miserablist waiting in the aisles. Hello Simon Jenkins.

I must balance the pleasure of watching young people competing for medals against dismay at the billions spent turning my city into a tacky shambles.

Dismay Simon? Come on, you're English. You're enjoying it.

I blame the weather.

Prophecy

The sagacity and foresight of that fount of all economic knowledge, the 'Troika' of lenders to Greece, is there for all to see. With confidence and self-assurance they predicted that as a result of their stern but necessary policies:

Greece' economy would contract by 2.6pc in 2010 under the austerity regime, before recovering with growth of 1.1pc in 2011, and 2.1pc in 2012.

The critics scoffed, but the results of their policies were that ... er ...

In fact, Greek GDP has been in an unbroken free-fall. It did not grow last year. It contracted a further 6.9pc, and is now expected to shrink 6.7pc this year ... Roughly speaking, the Troika has misjudged the scale of economic decline over three years by 12pc of GDP.

This from a superb, angry piece byAmbrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph, please read it all.

The response from the policy makers is, of course, more of the same, with a scribbled note added to the bottom of the prescription; "must try harder." And if Greece fails to comply, they will be duly punished. I have stopped thinking that the policies were a product of an ideological fixation that might respond to reality, instead we have gone way beyond even wishful thinking into magical thinking - that if we want something to happen enough, it will - underpinned by the fear that decisive action may cost them real money.

Now the Troika appear to be quite relaxed about letting Greece go. As they wipe away a crocodile tear from one eye, I would recommend that they keep the other on Spain. Already deep in difficulties, the remedies being applied are identical and still the EU think that the results will be different. And if you think the Greek crisis has been a problem - you ain't seen nothing yet.

Knotty problems

There is an excellent article on the Greek economic crisis in the Wall Street Journal from Marcus Walker and Marianna Kakaounaki.

Walker and Kakaounaki look at the impact of 'internal devaluation' on the real Greek economy. This is a brief summary of their argument: 

The IMF admit that the conditions are probably wrong for internal devaluation to work, yet continue to press it on Greece. Export businesses need internal devaluation to increase competitiveness to be able to export. In the meantime internal devaluation is sucking domestic demand out of the economy, thereby hampering the development of the necessary infrastructure for domestic growth and for those self-same export businesses. Borrowing and lending costs are too high and confidence is too low. Whilst tourism, one of the biggest earners of foreign exchange, is less competitive due to the exchange rate. What a tangled mess. They reckon that,

If the euro zone unravels, the deeper reason won't be fiscal indiscipline or political dithering. It will be because struggling nations' euro membership, coupled with Germany's approach to its own economy, leaves them with a route to recovery that some economists say is barely feasible—socially, politically or financially.

Instead of admitting their failures and dealing with the real problem, the EU seem to be following a time-honoured military strategy. Urge the poor bloody infantry in the front line to make increasing numbers of futile sacrifices, whilst securing the home front from the consequences of the inevitable defeat. It never works.

I hate to come over all classical about this, but isn't it Gordian knot cutting time?

Sultry

Another part of Greece not in crisis.

Reality or otherwise

Comment is Free has done it again. This has got a lot of people spluttering on various forums. It is another in the long line of apologias, this time for ... wait for it ... North Korea.  According to the author, a football writer;

... the hypocrisy of using one-sided journalism to label North Korea a rogue, propaganda-led state is surely self-evident and fans the fire of intolerance and animosity.

It is a perfect example of the genre. It is so perfect that I wonder if this could possibly be another version of the Sokal Hoax - where a bogus and utterly meaningless jumble of jargon was accepted in an academic journal. Could the author be testing CiF's editorial control by submitting a spoof? The trouble is they have published so much of the genuine tosh it is hard to tell.

Who knows. I am probably being too kind. What it does show, however, is that the culture of publishing anything contrarian, regardless of its relationship to truth or even, in this case, common humanity, is alive and well in the Guardian's portals. You can almost hear them,  'Let's be reasonable and give a fair hearing to murderous dictatorships old boy. They deserve to have their case heard.' This is the posh paper's version of phone hacking: abandon all standards ye who enter here.

Originally via Norm.

Party time

It was the village's panegyri last night.  There was music and  dancing at the front, taking place against a background hum of inattentive chatter. Later in the evening a hot wind blew, warming an already sweltering night and stirring the sea to join in the general hubbub. I staggered home around three in the morning and as the music faded the wind grew stronger, whistling through the trees around my house, creating a different soundscape.

Bleary-eyed I opened the shutters this morning and the wind had turned round to come from the north taking the heatwave with it. The weather is now gorgeous and though the cat stole my breakfast and spilt coffee all over my keyboard when I chased it off, nothing can really spoil the day.

And all the while, the reportage that I have seen in the UK media suggests that I am in a war zone. Tourist numbers have declined sharply, yet Greek life continues and anyone considering a holiday should not be put off. This is still a lovely country and it needs your money more than ever.

But that doesn't mean that the crisis is not real enough and, of course, it is being felt much more sharply in Athens than in rural Pelion. Today, the IMF announced that both the Spanish and Greek deficits were higher than forecast.  Well, who would have guessed that inducing a recession would reduce income and raise social security costs? What a surprise. So the solution? Let's do more of the same, it might work this time. And if they won't do the wrong things by themselves, let's make sure that we do the wrong things for them, and do them even worse than they could have managed if left to their own devices. No country could have escaped the impact of the global banking disaster and Greece had many vulnerabilities that meant that it would certainly have faced an economic crisis in its wake. But it wouldn't be this one. Not one with 'made in the EU' stamped all over it.

Costas Lapavitsas thinks that we are nearing the endgame as the EU leadership seems intent on changing politics from being the art of the possible into the imposition of the impossible. But in the meantime, book your holiday and remember the message of these two inspirational posters from our local cultural association.

The unconsidered

It is John Maynard Keynes who is credited with saying, "even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist." I would add that much of what passes for technical economic diagnosis is underpinned by a whole set of social and moral assumptions as well.

At the moment one of these is that the mere possession of power confers wisdom. So moves to resolve the Euro crisis by creating ever greater integration is phrased in the language of passing control over to central authorities so that they, with a heavy sigh, can do it right. This makes much sense to people who assume that they must be correct in every way. Those of us who look on with increasing bewilderment at their actions have their doubts. Mind you, our protestations are met with disdain from those on the Olympian heights convinced of their own disinterested intellectual gifts. Good, virtuous European citizenship means respect for authority in their eyes. Meanwhile, the people who have to deal with the real impact of their policies, gaze upwards and mumble the word 'idiots'.

Their general contempt for the powerless is compounded by an ungenerous, pinched view of people's suffering. It is rooted in the old notion of the deserving and undeserving poor - a view held widely by the undeserving rich. Their wealth is, of course, entirely merited and the poverty of the poor is solely down to their failures. So they raise their eyes skywards, sugest that some may be redeemable, up to a point suitable for their station, if they pull their socks up and work as hard as the wealthy. But then reality creeps in for the un-deluded and points out that hard work, grindingly hard work, the sort that involves emptying the bed pans of the demented, caring for those whom others would rather forget, is often rewarded with poverty pay.

So, as one version or another of the latest conventional wisdom is endlessly ground out, it is nice to be shaken awake by reading something different. Near the end of David Graeber's intriguing book on debt there is this:

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction. 

Even though his perspective is viewed through the rosiest of rose tinted glasses, my heart lifts. Here the most unconsidered and stigmatised are given value - what a generous view of the world. It is a reminder of the closing words of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

 An uncomfortable thought for those who are certain of their own importance.

In a heatwave

Find a cool spot and ...

Following on

Nick Cohen's comment that I quoted in my previous post certainly got to George. It is one of those occasions when phrases written to impress upon the reader the urgent necessity to deal with the neglect and exploitation of a potentially 'lost generation' betray deeper social assumptions that take us beyond the words' intended meaning. Basically, there are two such assumptions at play here. They infect political life and public policy as much as our private lives. Although using the language of hard-headed rationality, they are, in reality, moral discourses. And both, in my view, are utterly wrong.

The first is that youth is not a stage in life, but is a virtue. Is it possible to have a party leader who is not under fifty and often scarcely over forty? The fresh-faced, telegenic figure is seen to be the epitome of political cool, a necessity for that elusive asset - electability. Although what I see when I look at the Camerons, Cleggs and Millibands is an almost frightening inexperience. And even if they are intelligent people, and they certainly must have a ruthless cunning, what is intelligence without experience?

The second is that dependency is a state of sin. I have touched on this before. The refrain of the elderly, 'I don't want to be a burden', is a cry of guilt from someone who worries for their children but craves their love and support. I have yet to see any empirical evidence for the much mythologised damage caused by 'dependency culture', but the appalling pain of neglect is evident everywhere.

Instead, I would argue that dependency is a state of virtue. We seek it out, longing for dependents to complete our lives. We form partnerships 'in sickness and in health', we tend gardens that would collapse into wildernesses without our constant care, we keep pets, feed and adopt stray animals, make strong friendships and feel sad when children leave home.

But what of independence? It is liberty, the essence of youth and a joyful escape from constraints. But that too is transitory as we build our own voluntary bonds and slip into dependence on others as others do with us. And that very mutuality makes us happy.

Youth and age, dependence and independence. They are the dialectic of life; unresolvable and inescapable. Our existence is bound by enigma and ambiguity, not brutal clarity. And the mark of a civilised society is one that values it all.

Divide and rule

I am writing seriously at the moment, so haven't as much time for blogging. But a bit of conventional wisdom seems to be cropping up recently that I have a vested interest in and I wanted to comment on it. Why? Well, despite being a young, vigorous buck in my own mind, the empirical reality is that I am not quite in the first flush of youth. And, actually, I have sort of retired.

This all began a little while ago. There was this argument floating around. It started as an attack on babyboomers and it was not without some validity. The notion was that the generation to which I belong had the best of everything, which is true - we were lucky, but when it came to their turn to pay for the next generation to have similar benefits they became parsimonious and demanded tax cuts instead. Now I am not too sure that it is entirely due to all of us being selfish, rather I might just suggest that a change in the elite consensus on how economies are managed could have had something to do with it. And maybe those super-rich enthusiasts for a bit of state-aided redistribution coming their way could take a bit of the flak as well. But never mind, if you have a few million people to blame instead, why not go for them?

Gradually, rather than being venerated for our wisdom and experience, we seem to be becoming the target of 'progressive' opinion. Robert Skidelsky is after retirement itself. Whilst, I may agree with this: 

... the rich and super-rich have raced ahead from everyone else; and there are 13 million households, or 21% of the population, who live below the officially designated poverty line. This group cannot reasonably be expected to trade income for leisure. They must first have more income.
How to bring about those more equal conditions of life needed to realise the promise of leisure for all is the main social challenge facing advanced capitalist countries. 

I am less sure about his view that part of the way to do this is

The abolition of the concept of retirement, with "special needs" to be attended to by a retirement agency. 

Now I have to admit bits of retirement are not easy, especially for someone like me who loved his job and retired earlier than he would have liked in circumstances that he would rather not have happened. But there are benefits, especially today as I can look out on a blisteringly hot day at my beautiful Greek garden that I had the sense to acquire when I was still earning. Now I can contemplate long, extended stays here. Yet this guy sees me chained to work forever, even if I am only working three-hour days (actually too short to do anything meaningful). Yes, state pensions and the idea of a retirement age only came in for the first time in 1908, but it was to replace the workhouse.

A couple of weeks ago in his Spectator blog post Nick Cohen also chipped in about how the Tories are targeting young people, including the horrible proposal to remove housing benefit from the under twenty-fives. Again, he makes a decent point well when he points out the fact that older people are more likely to vote and thus are a much more politically dangerous target to hit. (I would point out that older people actually have taken a number of hits, from pension mis-selling, changes to the way pensions are calculated, the rising retirement age etc., to the hidden ones like the death of non-accredited adult education, which was a lifeline to many of the retired). But then he makes a utilitarian point about the need to invest in the young.

I am sorry to be brutal, but there is no way of phrasing it delicately: the young are our future and the old are our burden. 

Hold on a second. There is a bit of natural justice to consider. Someone leaving school at eighteen has just spent the whole of their lives being "our burden", paid for by the old. The old have worked most of their lives, contributed in other ways, such as by being carers, and coughed up taxes for more than forty years. If we get a few perks to go with our sharply reduced incomes, I would like to point out that we have bloody paid for them! The young have so far paid nothing.

Obviously, youth unemployment is a problem and a far worse one in Greece and Spain. The young need a start and wouldn't it be good if they too could look forward to some liberty at the end of their working lives or even that people should continue to work if they want to? If the problem is about how we enable the young to become the contributors they desperately want to be in a contracting economy, then the problem is the contracting economy, not pensioners. One generation doesn't have to be supported at the expense of the other. Of course, eventually they are the same people. The old were once young and the young, if they are lucky, will be old. And, if I remember correctly, there is something else that differentiates people and their life chances at the moment that seems to be a bit more permanent and pertinent. What is it again? Oh yes; class.

Ethics

Charles, that is what we do - we go out and destroy other people's lives.

Harry Potter and the Ethics of News International

A manifesto

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Misattributed all over the place it may be, including to Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein though probably coming from Rita Mae Brown in her book Sudden Death, but here is another example:

Moreover past experience includes no relevant case where budget cuts have actually generated increased economic activity. The IMF has studied 173 cases of budget cuts in individual countries and found that the consistent result is economic contraction. In the handful of cases in which fiscal consolidation was followed by growth, the main channels were a currency depreciation against a strong world market, not a current possibility. The lesson of the IMF’s study is clear - budget cuts retard recovery. And that is what is happening now - the countries with the biggest budget cuts have experienced the biggest falls in output.

From A Manifesto from Economic Sense.

Unreality check

This piece by Tom Clynes is a really good summary article on the current state of climate change denial. Much of it is familiar, the same story of the distribution of misinformation and denigration of good scientific research, substituting wishful thinking for reality. There is also something deeply unpleasant happening; the publication of climate scientists' email addresses on denialist sites and the resulting deluge of death threats and obscene hate mail that follows. Here is one example from Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist:

“When I get an e-mail that mentions my child and a guillotine,” Hayhoe says, “I sometimes want to pull a blanket over my head. The intent of all this is to discourage scientists. As a woman and a mother, I have to say that sometimes it does achieve its goal. There are many times when I wonder if it’s worth it.”

But what struck me most were two numbers. The first comes from the Steve Milloy who runs a denialist web site. He said, "There’s really only about 25 of us doing this". Yes, only twenty-five people are claiming that, at worst, there is a global conspiracy of tens of thousands of research scientists to falsify their findings or, at best, in one of the greatest outbreaks of mass incompetence the world has seen, that they are all wrong and have been so since serious research into the impact of greenhouse gas emissions began in the 1950s. The fact that these few have recruited so many supporters is enormous testament to their skills as lobbyists and publicists and to the extraordinary power of the internet when it comes to the dissemination of information (or of complete bollocks).
The second number raised my spirits though. 

This spring, four major universities released polls showing that a clear majority of American citizens now say that the world is warming and that the country should take action. Jon Krosnick, a professor of communications at Stanford University, conducted one of the polls. He found that 83 percent of Americans say they believe that the Earth has been warming. One significant factor, he suggests, is that Americans can finally see and feel climate change happening.

In other words, this band of twenty-five, despite their deep penetration of the Republican Party and their base in the Tea Party, are losing. And they are losing because however much reality is denied, it has a funny habit of winning out in the long run. Vociferous, noisy and abusive climate change denial may be, but it is on its last legs. The fear was that the 'skeptics', as some like to be known, were winning. And now there is confirmation that they are not. They are becoming marginal, inhabiting solely the dark corners of the internet and the recesses of the political right. 

Yet, once again, mainstream politics seems to be running behind this mass outbreak of sense. Leaders seem scared to take action, putting off dealing with the problem, hoping that everything will turn out for the best. The tragedy of this is that, instead of the dystopian primitivism conjured up by denialists, action on climate change should be leading us to the brink of a new industrial revolution, one based on different sources of energy. An era of low-carbon sustainable industry and prosperity beckons and instead the skeptics wish to keep us in a warming world with disturbing potential consequences.

Hat tip to Stephen 

Reality check

I can say with absolute confidence that Angela Merkel is not the most popular person in this neck of the woods. From the Greek perspective, EU policy seems to be more of a German diktat, and a hostile one at that. But in Germany this sentiment is is seen more as ingratitude. There is a huge gap in perceptions. So here are two pieces that argue that the German view is the one furthest from reality and that its actions are potentially as damaging to itself as they are to the countries of the periphery

First, Simon Tilford argues,

The current strategy for dealing with the eurozone crisis is largely a German one. But far from limiting the risks to Germany, it is maximising them. The German economy is not immune to the economic slump enveloping a growing swathe of Europe. One country after another will need bailing out, with Germany ultimately providing the back-stop. Much of this debt will not be repaid, leading to a dramatic rise in Germany's public indebtedness. Without a mutualisation of risk, the euro will collapse, with devastating implications for German exports (to EU and non-EU markets alike as a euro collapse would hit the global economy hard), the value of Germany's foreign investments, and the stability of its banking sector. These are just some of the direct economic costs; the political fall-out would be grave for Germany. Isolated and blamed for the collapse, it would be poorly placed to pursue its interests through whatever is left of the EU.

Whilst in the Financial Times Wolfgang Munchau speculates on the tactics that could be used by Mario Monti

The point is not so much to call Angela Merkel’s bluff, as some of my Italian and Spanish friends have been urging. She is not bluffing, despite the fact that a break-up of the eurozone would clearly be disastrous for Germany. Joschka Fischer, the former foreign minister, said recently that by allowing the eurozone to break up, Germany would for the third time in a century have inflicted utter devastation on Europe and on itself. 

Those who advocate the strategy of calling Germany’s bluff often assume a degree of rationality that is plainly absent. The Germans have developed a strange narrative of the crisis. Following the debate there, as I do regularly, has a parallel universe feel about it. There is, for example, a denial that the current account surpluses are even remotely a factor.

What both have in common is the sense that a resolution of the crisis will be impossible until German policy makers begin to understand the reality of their impact on the peripheral countries and, most importantly, of the growing risks that austerity poses to Germany itself.

More than a game

Germans cheering on Greece. Well, they do live there.

If you want to understand Greeks, he says, you only need to watch them when the bill comes at a taverna. "The Greeks will try to sneak in and pay for everyone, the Germans will try sneak out to avoid the bill."

And then there are Greeks cheering on Greece - in Germany.

"Like most Greeks who live here, I dream of some-day going back to Greece," he said. "But the crisis in my home country continues and it's becoming more difficult to find work there. I have to stay in Germany to survive." ... 

Like most Greeks in Germany, both [the two interviewees] will watch tonight's game in the firm believe [sic] that poetic justice will secure a Greek victory.

These are from a really nice piece about popular attitudes of expats in both countries and how they crystallise around a single football match. Overall, I think that this needs repeating often:

Sitting in a beachfront taverna, Ms Hilbrecht says things would have to get worse in Greece before she would move back to Germany. "Even in a crisis this is still a great place to live." 

 But then again, so does this; for those at the bottom of the pile, it is getting less and less true.

Boringly predictable

Greece supporters in Poland are having T-shirts specially printed ahead of Friday's quarter-final against Germany in Gdansk. The slogan: "It's time we kicked you out of the euro."

 Everyone will post this today - so I might as well join in.

Against elitism

Classical music is not elitist, it can be liberating. Watch this video on the Scottish version of the famed Venezuelan El Systema.

"Eighty percent of the children on Raploch are musicians"

Claims to fame.

One is and one isn't - from Croydon that is.

Economics

The remedy for too little spending is more spending. Everything else is commentary.

Samuel Brittan

The times we live in

What is the worst offence? Picking up a publicly funded £420,000 redundancy cheque after working for only sixteen months planning a programme of cuts, or naming them Change to Keep Succeeding?

Election day

Whoever wins ...

Elinor Ostrom

 Complexity is not the same as chaos

Having managed a complex programme of adult education, I would have loved to have beaten that sentiment into the minds of managers who looked only for neatness and a managerial structure of command, control and obedience. The words are those of Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate for economics in 2009, who died yesterday.

Her best known book is Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, which uses empirical research to examine how, given the right conditions, self-management of what she calls "common pool resources" by their users works better than either state or private ownership for conservation and effective management of those resources. The key to allowing this to happen is good reciprocal communication and trust - possibly the two elements most frequently lacking in modern managerialism.

Her work on complex systems, ecology and common property regimes, together with her stress on inter-disciplinarity, flexibility and diversity, has widespread applications and consequences. You can get a sense of her work through listening to her impressive Nobel lecture here. Whilst what follows is an eight-minute talk on sustainability.

There is also a fascinating personal interview with her here.

Parallels

We overstate historical parallels and certainly lapse into inappropriate analogies far too often (no, Merkel is not Hitler). History is not a mechanical process. Even when governments take similar courses of action they do so in different contexts, whilst people have learnt from experience and behave differently. However, sometimes the parallels can be unnerving.

In this piece Mark Mazower pursues two of the main themes of his historical writing, modern Greece and the fragility of European democracy. 

It is one of the achievements of the European Union's insistence on austerity at any cost that Greece's democratic stabilisation now seems jeopardised. Once democracy's guarantor, Europe itself has now become the chief source of pressure upon it ... Yet Greeks have not turned against Europe: on the contrary, public opinion remains deeply committed to membership of the union... Nor do the Greeks fail to recognise the need for a sweeping reform of the public finances. The reason for the implosion of the two-party system is simply because in the absence of any plausible scenario or package for growth to accompany Europe's endless cost-cutting demands, the country's suffering and social disintegration seem futile.

The refrain is familiar,  but Mazower's voice is a warning against complacency. And his conclusion is tentative.

It now falls to the Greeks in the most testing of circumstances to demonstrate the tenacity of their commitment to Europe. And it falls to the Germans to uphold Europe's commitment to democracy itself.

Reminders

First, something for all of those who think that knowledge is valuable only for its current utility.  From this nice book review on a new history of science:

But as we read of the tentative steps of the pioneers we are led to wonder again that science ever emerged in human culture. It had to run the gauntlet of practical men and women who jeered at the scientists' obsession with footling things – minuscule animals seen through the microscope, for instance. All of the knowledge that had sustained human society until that point – processing raw food into bread, cheese, beer and wine, tilling the ground, building cathedrals, sailing across the oceans – had been the work of skilled craftsmen, uninformed by any scientific principle whatsoever. 

Secondly, from the same review, a reminder of reality for those that tout the notion of 'ancient wisdom'.

As Ball puts it, the complaints of the naysayers can be summed up as: "small and distant things were small and distant precisely because they were not meant to concern us." So much for the plague bacillus that was wreaking havoc in London when the Royal Society was born, so much, ultimately, for DNA and the computer chip. What was meant to concern us, according to this view, was the scriptures and the received wisdom of the ages. Now the power of those small and distant trifles is everywhere apparent and the wisdom of the ancients stands revealed as a tissue of arbitrary fabrications.

And finally, for all my friends in the UK, a reminder that this is what summer looks like.

Honesty

This is one way of communicating:

Greece is speechless! Totally out of control  spokesman of Chrysis Avgi (Golden Dawn) and elected MP Ilias Kassidiaris punched Communist KKE MP Liana Kanelli while on live studio on ANT1 TV on Thursday morning. Just seconds earlier Kassidiaris had thrown water against SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou. The prosecutor asked the arrest of Golden Dawn MP for “dangerous physical damage”, while he is on the run.

How obliging of the neo-Nazis to be so open about who they are.

Then there is this rather nice talk about cognitive dissonance and critical thought. It appeals to me because throughout my teaching career I have been embarrassingly wrong on so many things, but I still think that I am brilliant.



And finally, another example of the media's remarkable ability to misrepresent research in order to get a good headline. This time it is about the supposed recommendation that safe drinking limits should be reduced to a quarter of a pint of beer daily. As one of the authors the report blogs, this is not what they said. But they did come up with the finding that even relatively small amounts alcohol do increase health risks. He is disarmingly honest:

On a personal note I am not pleased by the results of our research.  I was hoping that alcohol might have been better for my health.

As for me I am going to pour myself a large glass of wine and begin to rationalise about how it is exceedingly good for me.

Beauty

"Wherever you look, you see beauty." These were the words of the official presiding over the civil wedding ceremony as he welcomed the guests to South Pelion.

Earlier the cavalcade of cars had wound up the hill, horns blaring, to a spectacular backdrop of mountains and sea. After the ceremony everyone emerged into the town square, shaded by giant plane trees, the tables laid out for a night of eating and drinking. The band was already in place, the bouzouki player tuning up against the sound of Euro pop standards from the loudspeakers. Milling around the flower display, picking their seats, were friends and acquaintances. A happy day and, yes, he was right. All I could see was beauty.

Greece is a lovely country, though there is ugliness as well. Much of this is being intensified by the crisis and the self-defeating response of the 'Troika' of lenders, described, as quoted in this article, by  Yanis Varoufakis as "the biggest idiots in the history of economics."

Later in the evening, fuelled by wine and tsipouro, I strolled over to the museum dedicated to the work of the local artist Thanasis Fampas. It was closed, but the sculptures outside were floodlit and the lights were on inside. Fampas' work is gorgeous. The on-line gallery doesn't do it justice. The eyes of his subjects are often blank, instead they express themselves through their hands and the shape of their bodies. They hold and they caress whilst the pictures caress you. As I peered through the windows the official dashed up with the caretaker and to my surprise unlocked the doors and ushered me in for my own private tour. This is so Greek, a spontaneous outburst of pride and generosity. He told me how the museum was run and maintained by volunteers and that though he was retired with a pension he would often work twelve hour days for no pay, simply for the good of the community. Beauty everywhere.

Yet despite this simple truth, Greece still struggles against the lies of the wealthy with their narrative of the chilly, industrious north pitted against the indolence of the feckless south with its Mediterranean sun. But perhaps the most pervasive self-deception that the rich endlessly trot out is the idea that their privilege is solely the result of their own merit, their intelligence and their hard work. It's never good luck, the legacy of previous generations, nor do they credit the support of family, friends or the institutions that gave them their education. And heaven forbid that there is any debt of gratitude to the work of those they employ. This attitude breeds a meanness of spirit, which suggests that the poverty of others is the result of their moral failures and that the solution lies in being more like them. Any proposal for aid to relieve suffering brings a horrified cry of 'moral hazard' - the fear that any help will only encourage the poor to continue in their unproductive ways and, thus, if it is not to be withheld entirely, it certainly has to be accompanied by proper strictures and hedged with conditions.

This seems to be the attitude of the German government with its insistence on austerity. But let's look again at what was the basis for the post-war German economic miracle. Was it the result of some inherent Calvinist work ethic as they often suggest? Or might it just have been because of the Marshall Plan? German debts were written off and investment flooded the country. It was an extraordinary act; a compound of generosity and self-interest. Help was understood to be far more likely to promote reform and prevent a repetition than punishment. And what was the sin that was forgiven? Had they sat around in bierkellers wasting borrowed money on idle luxuries? Not quite, they had launched the most destructive war in human history and committed genocide. And if that can be forgotten, surely the Greek crime of joining the Euro and spending too much buying German goods on cheap credit is worthy of a more generous response than the punishment of austerity.

So we come back to beauty. And perhaps one of the most beautiful of human qualities is generosity. You meet it here a lot. And as a moral underpinning to public policy it leads people to think that the proper response to those who are struggling is help, not punishment. And if that approach to the economic crisis had been tried three years ago it is clear that we would not be in the mess that we are in today.