Tiny, tiny people

[koganbot]

This long post by Steve Randy Waldman has been getting attention in the econ blogosphere and is a slamming bit of writing that's also clear and coherent and seems to explain a lot.

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

The two money quotes, so to speak:

With respect to

Comments

mandates

[ext_3221401]

why do you say Syriza doesn't have a mandate for Grexit? After a 60% no vote that if we are to understand it meant anything, it meant a Grexit, a mandate seems to be about all it has.

Re: mandates

[koganbot]

Hey Mordy! Nice to hear from you.

Okay, I haven't been tracking this all that closely, but as far as I know no one in the public official leadership of Syriza has ever argued publicly in favor of Grexit. When they won in January they said they were going to negotiate to end austerity and stay in the eurozone. In the runup to the referendum they said that a "no" vote was not a vote for Grexit. They said they would sue to stay in the eurozone if the EU tried to throw them out. In his speech celebrating the "no" victory Tsipras specifically said it was not a mandate for a rupture with Europe. Of course, I can't source these and I'm about to go to bed anyway and I'm damned if I'm going to post any more links, but I trust my memory on this. Syriza said all along that they could win the negotiation and stay in the eurozone. They were probably wrong, and there could well be factions within Syriza who have no illusions about this and thought Grexit could or should be the outcome. But Syriza's official policy is that Grexit won't be the

Re: mandates

[dubdobdee]

tsipras went on TV explicitly to state that "no" did not mean grexit -- had he not done this, he would likely not have won his referendum

My perspective (responding mainly to the original Renzi query):

[dubdobdee]

Syriza came on the scene - won the election/formed the coalition - with a tactical plan and a strategic plan.

The tactical: to negotiate a new package with the troika (as the previous one was shortly to run its), which gave much better protection to the vulnerable and did not impact so ruinously on growth etc.
The strategic: to begin to enable a Europe-wide pushback agains the ideology of austerity

Grexit was/is strongly contra-indicated at both levels: (first) with Grexit you'll get (probably much) worse austerity. The balancing argument that at least you now have control of your economic destiny is, unfortunately, weak - Greece is a net importer of food and fuel. Second: the general pushback could/can never be effective if it only manifests in one quite small country (population-wise, it’s quite big geographically), with not much economic leverage (see point above, abt being a net importer). For pushback to become a thing at all, Europe-wide, and for it to benefit Greece, Greece has to be in Europe still, working closely

Re: My perspective (responding mainly to the original Renzi query):

[dubdobdee]

It’s historically a problem for a new political party, that while it has the enthusiasm iit (in effect) can’t get the staff. In particular (in this instance), it likely doesn’t have experienced high-end diplomats to hand - they are all working for the established parties, who pay better and have been around longer. They may happen to discover a natural genius for it in their own ranks - there are plenty of very smart people in Syriza (though they tend to be academic smart rather than practical smart). But it’s a gamble, to say the least,. The Syriza solution (I’m afraid I largely blame Varoufakis for this, though Tsipras plainly went along with it) was a kind of punk rock, technique-is-bullshit showboating bluster. Diplomacy is all a fraud! Game theory is a con! It’s all just the powerful playing games! We will blow the cover on their meaningless games! Result: I think the (very experience) negotiators on the other side saw an adolescent shitshow coming a mile off, and simply sat down to wait it out. By their own admission, the Greek

Re: My perspective (responding mainly to the original Renzi query):

[koganbot]

Thank you for this terrific commentary, most of which I'm not yet ready to respond to.

About the IMF, and its recent report (which I haven't read but wouldn't have understood if I had): as soon as the report came out there was a battle over how to spin it. The first news account I saw was actually claiming - perhaps correctly - that fundamentally the report was an attack on Syriza for hurting the Greek economy over the last five months, about how things would have been progressing well if only Syriza had not come to power, and that the release was intended to hurt the "No" campaign and help the "Yes." Then I read commentary that emphasized how the report called the current debt burden unsustainable and was an implicit call for debt relief, and the claim (has it been verified, or this just more spin?) that the other two troiks had attempted to suppress the report's release for fear it would encourage a "No" vote

Re: My perspective (responding mainly to the original Renzi query):

[koganbot]

there are people in every country who can recognise themselves in the Greek pensioners

Hmmm. My fear is that the people in other countries who should identify with Greek pensioners, or with Greek school teachers whose savings and employment are at risk or gone, don't get it at all, that, e.g., German and French school teachers and pensioners have no idea that it was potentially their own savings and jobs that were rescued in the first two "Greek bailouts"* but do believe that bits of their own money are being taken away to pay for the profligate Greeks

the original matteo renzi question

[dubdobdee]

(since it doesn't appear here)

was: if SOMEONE is going to stand up to angela merkel -- and if syriza have essentially nopw capitulated -- is that someone italy's matteo renzi

above is my rather digressive answer: that i think syriza's seemingly doomed (and thus ill-advised) theatre over the last six months may have catalysed the beginnings of a europe-wide anti-austerity movement, some of it from countries (such as spain) able to inflict genuine hurt on the EU/EZ that greece never could*

*actually this is inaccurate: grexit five years ago would have led to massive contagion and collapse; but much of the intrastructure allowing this was rebuilt in the interim

We have mail

[koganbot]

NY Times public editor Margaret Sullivan returns from vacation to share an email she found waiting for her from reader Margaret Hagen, regarding an explanatory article on the Greek crisis:

There is hardly a single sentence in the explanation without some vacuous jargon term of no explanatory value at all to the reader. Readers who understand this jargon will not read this article. Readers who do not will understand very little after reading it because of the non-explanatory jargon.
Meanwhile, the Greek proposal includes getting a loan, which the NY Times is thoughtfully blithely insouciantly eagerly calling a "bailout." Debt restructuring may be part of the deal (perhaps in negotiations to come). Actual debt writedown is still vigorously opposed in the north and east. Also don't know how much of the loan will be used for interest and debt payments and how much for dancing with trained seals other stuff. Maybe the latter is to be financed by newly, beautifully collected taxes.

[dubdobdee]

a lot too much too quickly to gather my thoughts -- but for now i think i'm going to stick with my feeling that greece's relative success at the strategic level is significant (as outlined above), if only in the sense that two distinct camps with the EU are increasingly evident: not only did renzi give schauble a public and face-to-face telling off yesterday, but schauble and draghi more or less got into a screaming match (schauble: "DON'T TAKE ME FOR AN IDIOT" <-- "we take you as we find you" is said to be the classic response), and (from within germany) der spiegel was sharply critical of the german govt's stance (this being the german paper i think many teachers would read, to pick up your example of who ought to be seeing themselves in the greek pensioners

[koganbot]

Don't know how much the Twitterverse is indicative of anything, but there's this from Alex White:

My comment yesterday critical of German approach: retweeted 730 times. My comment pointing out the risks of alternative: retweeted 6 times
- Alex White (@AlexWhite1812) July 13, 2015

[koganbot]

Yeah, fiscal stimulus is hard to implement on the street level by community organizers.

My feeling is that to achieve better-informed voters we need to create more interested voters, and I mean "interested" in an aesthetic sense: people who discover that they find the economic ideas FUN.* That's a hard one even among intellectuals, though I do think it's one of Krugman's strengths: in a sense he's the Stephen Jay Gould of economics, or one of several. This does mean that, in the U.S., he reaches PBS type leftists but not the downtrodden. In Europe is there more of a chance to interact with the latter, say an actual working-class/underclass marginal intelligentsia that converses with the official intelligentsia?

*So, more interesting voters, as well.