"And They Invented Math!"

Michael Lewis, who expertly profiled Iceland’s collapse last year, has now set his sights on Greece. Lewis chronicles a country accustomed to corruption, handouts, and “breathtaking inefficiency.” “Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other,” he writes. “It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.” [%comments]