salm wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I confess ignorance of internal German politics. What principles would he be having to go against to negotiate another bailout?
He´s an ordoliberal, so austerity instead of stimulus is his answer to such a problem.
Aaah. Well in that case, good riddance to him. If your answer to hungry old women is "let them eat cat food," you really don't belong in government.
salm wrote:Firstly, they're not the only participants in the whole thread, just the ones participating heavily right now. So the sample is more than two.
Another point is that... well. SDN is not normally a hotbed of racism, nationalism, or nationalist stereotypes. If you were, HYPOTHETICALLY, seeing nationalist stereotyping even here, it would suggest that there's a larger problem in places that aren't SDN.
Well, Im not going to base my opinion on the crisis on a couple of posters on SD.net. Be it two or be it ten, it´s not representative.
My instinctive reaction here is that you may have lost track of what we were talking about here.
Your opinion
on the Greek debt crisis is your own and should presumably not be based on what a few SDN posters do.
But if your goal is to understand what this "lazy Greeks" meme is, and why the Greeks resent it...
That is something you might learn a little about by looking at SDN. You can learn more looking in other places- talk to Crown about that. But this thread at least provides a few illustrations of the nature of the problem. Since it's one source I know we both have easy access to, I used it to illustrate the concept.
For a more detailed discussion we could start with what Crown mentions in this post here:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 7#p3915597
The problem is that it really doesn't matter whether you accuse the Greeks of personal vices like 'laziness' or collective vices like 'unwilling to make reforms.' On some level there isn't even a practical difference between calling the Greeks 'greedy' (an individual vice) and calling them 'corrupt' (a collective vice).
"Corrupt" can be an individual vice. It depends on whom you call corrupt. Do you call individuals corrupt or system xyz?
I think it´s even bad to call it a vice. "Vice" implies malice, incompetence or weakness of character wheras i think it´s simply a matter of several systems being broken that we should be interested in repairing.
OK, let's back up a moment.
If you think it's bad to talk about the current crisis as a result of "Greek vices," then we're in agreement, because
that's my point. All along, I was using "lazy Greeks" as a shorthand for various arguments of the form "the Greeks have vices, and all these problems have to do with those vices." Whereas I (and you, it seems) would prefer to talk in terms of "the Greeks are tangled up in a network of broken systems."
Thing is, when you talk about the network of broken systems, you have to make rather calm, rational decisions about which systems need to be fixed first.
And there are things that are obviously NOT going to do anything to fix the network, because they will if anything make things more broken. For example, austerity measures are likely to do this. So is loaning the Greeks more money while refusing (or being very reluctant) to forgive any of the interest payments on the existing loans.
The problem is that when you try to reason in this way, you arrive at conclusions that are... unpalatable to part of the European electorate. Like "Well, it looks like this Greek government debt will never be paid back, therefore we'll have to forgive it if we don't want Greece to turn into a failed state."
Since European taxpayers and governments spent a lot of money bailing out private banks and
buying that Greek government debt, many of them do not want to hear that. So they start looking for a different narrative in which they are not forced to accept an undesirable conclusion. A narrative like "it's not our fault the Greeks did something stupid, they have to fix their stupidity and corruption before we do
anything!"
The trouble is... such a narrative is not based on a calm analysis of the network of broken systems that brought us to this crisis in the first place. It will not end the crisis, in which case Greece will continue to devolve into a failed state.
Not sure if analogies like this are very useful. I can easily come up with an analogy that makes the other side look reasonable. If you have only a certain amount of spare livers you might want to give these livers to people whom you know won´t booze these livers into oblivion within a couple of months. So you tell the patient to stop drinking and if he manages to do so he can have a liver. Or any other kind of situation where scarce resources are traded for some sort of reform that is assumed to be necssary to prevent these resources from disappearing once changing hands.
In this case, though, the 'booze' and the 'spare livers' come from the same people. The 'spare liver' is debt forgiveness. If, after forgiving the debts, foreign creditors
stop loaning Greece money, Greece will be forced to recover from its metaphorical drinking problem and operate on a balanced budget.
At which point it can actually
benefit from fighting corruption and tax evasion. Because instead of having all the money it recovers from tax-dodgers go directly to foreign creditors, it can reinvest that money more efficiently into the Greek economy and produce actual growth instead of producing stagnation and long term debt-slavery.
Moreover, the resource here is not 'scarce' in the sense that there are several deserving recipients for each one of the small number of livers available. Forgiving the Greek debts only "costs" European governments in the sense that they won't get whatever money they WOULD get from asset-stripping Greece. Because those are really the only viable options:
1) Asset-strip Greece
2) Forgive Greek debts.
(1) will make some money in the short run but is not actually to the advantage of Europe as a whole. Because it would greatly damage the European unity project, and because it would ultimately result in Greece either becoming a failed state, or a wildly xenophobic and hostile state. Neither of those outcomes is worth the relatively small sums that can be had by stripping Greece of assets and selling them off to (private) foreign owners.
(2) will 'cost' money, but realistically
no one is endangered by doing this. If you transplant a liver to Bob, then Alex who needed that same liver is at risk of dying. That is WHY you are so careful about liver transplants- because by deciding who gets the transplant you decide the Bob will live and Alex will die, or the other way around.
If you forgive Greek debts, that doesn't mean that suddenly the Portuguese economy collapses because Portugal was counting on getting that same lump of debt forgiveness.
In the end there are reasons for solving short term problems first and there are reasons to start solving long term problems before concerning oneself with short term fixes. The latter is the case if you assume that the long term problems would undermine any short term fix anyway rendering the short term fix useless. And the way I understand it this is Schäubles reasoning.
Personally I´m not educated in economics enough to form a good opinion myself so I have to rely on experts. Since there are more experts supporting the Keynesian way of stimulus I´m inclined to believe them but I can see how you´d act the way Schäuble does when the underlying economical theory he is following tells him to implement austerity.
Out of curiosity, how much evidence should it take to convince Schäuble that his underlying theory is not working?
So there is the reason for an angry reaction to "lazy Greeks," which is itself shorthand for a broad category of responses to the Greek debt that focus on criticizing Greece rather than trying to eliminate an economic crisis. The reason for the angry reaction is that when you see "lazy Greeks" or any of the things it is shorthand for... that's a good sign that the person advancing the "lazy Greeks" argument either does not understand the situation*, or is actively trying to exploit the situation for their own benefit and doesn't actually care about the Greeks.**
I don´t think this is true. I think that "lazy" is a term that is used by tabloids to polarize the situation and to get peoples emotions high and buy the tabloid in question. Be it in Germany where people get annoyed because "Them lazy parasites are pissing way my Euros" or in Greece where "Them Nazis are calling me lazy even though I work more hours than them".
But such tabloid behavior is BOTH the actions of someone who does not understand the situation (the tabloid journalists) AND the actions of someone who is trying to exploit the situation for their own benefit (the tabloid publisher).
My point is simply that anyone advancing "lazy Greeks" argument is likely to either:
1) Not understand the situation and think it is
simply a matter of Greeks being lazy/corrupt/whatever, and that if the Greeks would just be good and honest then the problem would disappear. OR...
2) Understand the situation, but want to exploit the emotional reactions of others to make money or gain prestige.
For the popular media, both (1) and (2) may be in play. For politicians, business owners, and economists, one would hope that (1) is not in play, but (2) certainly is.
It´s a stupid and counterproductive term that does nothing more than distract from the actual discussion and introduces emotion into a place where emotion has no business. And quite frankly in place like sd.net that thinks of itself as educated I´m surprised to see people using arguments worthy only of tabloid rags.
And I fully agree with you on this- that's my point in the first place. I will note that most people here have been
relatively restrained in this matter and have not gone full-on "it's ALL because the Greeks are lazy entitled welfare queens."
But my point is simply that the entire line of reasoning based on "the Greeks need to stop feeling so entitled before this crisis can be solved" is toxic and will ultimately make things much worse. At best it will fail to fix the crisis. At worst it will actively put power into the hands of people trying to profit from the crisis by causing damage to Greece in ways that make money for them.
