“I’m all for reducing the number of public-sector employees,” an I.M.F. investigator had said to me. “But how do you do that if you don’t know how many there are to start with?”
That is from the new Michael Lewis article on Greece, entertaining throughout.
I just don’t understand why one should need to know exactly how many people are paid by her services at this very precise moment to be sure he has to pay less.
I really thought everyone should think at the margin
This is a fascinating article. I don’t think there is nearly enough ‘forensics’ journalism/economics work like this, and the article is pretty on point in describing the cultural and institutional factors that are important to a well functioning economy.
Add this to the list of reasons why Michael Lewis is Amercias best writer/journalist. Nobody weaves interesting ideas with narritive in such a seamless way.
Wow. What a well written article.
If I’m not mistaken this is just barely concealed racism dealing in stupid stereotypes which in this case particularly lacks self awareness. Said in a cutesy way, that makes it great huh, being as cliche ridden as this I don’t get how anyone can be so enthralled with the writing. I for one, as a non-Greek, wish I had the point of pride of living in a country less dominated by subservience to the class system as America is. Harvard. Hmmph. Is this the world we get from those geniuses?
@marcus:
Why is the article racist? Is it racist to try to draw correlations that are specific to a nation? If I said “Danes are tall”, or “Somalians are poor”, or “Germans drink beer” is that racist? I come from India and I’ll be the first one to say “Indian’s are thrifty” or “Indians are bad drivers”. Is that racist?
The sign of our times is that people cringe at drawing any correlation that is specific to a group of people identified by region, language or ethnicity. This just makes analysis less insightful by forcing people to pretend that the correlations that strike them in the face just don’t exist.
The previous administration in Greece destroyed all accountability, leaving the bomb to explode on the hands of the current administration. Greek statistics, fraudulent practices, coupled with chronic corruption and clientelistic modus operandi(a phenomenon quite common in southern Europe, with Italy being the champion on it) was in need of this non-accountability. So the new administration had to “set the records straight”. How do you construct a payroll, especially if you have all this bloated public sector with a bazillion of small civil service bureaus?
Easy, as it turns out, fast, and with the cost of a server. All civil servants had to complete a form, online, during the course of four weeks in July: full name, copies of their diplomas, a copy of an electricity bill, social security and tax register numbers (for their accounts to be opened), a description of their current function and a description of what their desired function would be in the future. An email address was to be imperatively given by the civil servant, for the state will never send a single piece of paper to them ever again, going paperless. Only people who filled this form online were to be paid from the 1st of October 2010.
The number of civil servants in Greece is 768.009. It took four weeks and the cost of an online server to create the register. The article you link to is not only uninformed and outdated by the facts, but also misleading.
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