Book review: The 13th Labour of Hercules, by Yannis Palaiologos
Despite narrowly avoiding eurozone expulsion, Greece remains in dire straits. In The 13th Labour of Hercules Athenian reporter Yannis Palaiologos explains how the once-flush, outwardly advanced economy collapsed so fast and stayed down.
by Yannis Palaiologos
Portobello Books
Despite narrowly avoiding eurozone expulsion, Greece remains in dire straits. In The 13th Labour of Hercules Athenian reporter Yannis Palaiologos explains how the once-flush, outwardly advanced economy collapsed so fast and stayed down.
Greece's worst flaw, it seems, is a culture of tax evasion as witnessed by tax reform expert Nikos Tatsos. He has seen countless ministers come in dreaming of making their mark in his field, only to be ground down by bureaucratic attrition. "You cannot go in there using a regular army," he tells Palaiologos. "You've sharp-shooters shooting at you … It's a guerilla war, and you need to use irregular methods to succeed."
Besides corruption, Greece suffers from inertia, incompetence, even "boundless fecklessness", as Palaiologos calls it. It ranks 109th out of 183 nations on ease of doing business - and last of the European Union's 28 member states.
The crisis began in earnest five years back when word of its epic hidden deficit surfaced. Then prime minister George Papandreou admitted the economy was in "intensive care". Cue doomed would-be rescue programmes.
The overarching austerity policy dictated by the EU and the IMF only fuelled anger embodied by the rise of extremist groups - so much for democracy, a Greek invention.