Tag Archives: Greece

Science

The ancient Greeks were just as kitschy as we are

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Today,  when we think of classical art, few things are as dignified and tasteful as the crumbling statues of ancient Greece. There’s something about the bare, weathered stone pieces, so full of history, that elevates them above mere decoration. In fact, we’re so used to the way they look now that it’s hard to imagine what they might have been like when the pieces were first made.

The article however shows how ultraviolet light can be used to reveal what they were like, or more importantly, what the artists of the time intended them to look like. All of a sudden, the statues seem a lot less dignified and very much like something we might find in a modern amusement park. Take this for example:

The ultraviolet light works by causing the organic compounds used in the original paint to fluoresce. Even in cases where it is difficult to figure out what the original hues were, researchers can also use infrared and x-ray spectroscopy to discover what materials were used to make the paints and derive what the colors must have been from there. It turns out that the Greek artists tended to use very tacky and loud colors which we wouldn’t find tasteful at all.

As one commenter on the article notes, it makes us wonder if someday far in the future, archaeologists might unearth the remains of Disneyland and think that all those figures and decorations represented the pinnacle of our art and were objects of great veneration.

News & Politics

European hypocrisy in Greek crisis

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So Greece is getting a bailout amounting to 750 billion Euros despite Angela Merkel swearing up and down that it wouldn’t happen. At least she’s getting some serious heat in Germany over it and it looks as if her days in political office are numbered. Apparently she gave in because she did not want to go down in history as the Chancellor who caused the Euro project to fail.

In the meantime, American commentators, such as Paul Krugman, have been talking up the disadvantages of the European currency union, which seems a bit mean spirited, unless you recall that the Europeans made similarly snide remarks about the health of American capitalism in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage blow up. What a difference a year makes!

More fun stuff:

  • Remember when the ratings agencies were blamed for the financial crisis and accused of conflict of interest issues due to rating CDO products too leniently? Now, they’re being blamed for rating European sovereign bonds too harshly. The rationale given is that the agencies are American, hence they must hate Europe.
  • European leaders have been outdoing each other attacking speculators for bringing about the current crisis in the first place, yet the Belgian finance minister has boasted that his country would make a profit on the loans it would make to Greece due to the spread between the rates Belgium pays for loans and the rates Greece needs to pay. As The Economist notes, it looks like speculation is not evil so long as governments are the ones doing it.

I’ve been previously been of the opinion that unified currencies are great. They should reduce cross border transaction costs and free central banks from government meddling. The corollary however is that governments then lose access to the toolbox of monetary policy to influence the economy. This should be okay, provided that governments are able to responsibly use the fiscal p0licy tools still available to them but I guess asking that governments be fiscally disciplined is too much of a pipe dream. This is why governments are forever hooked on the easy ways out of problems by playing with interest rates and devaluing their currencies.

News & Politics, Politics

Greek lessons

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I have to admit that I’m one of those who have been following the travails of the Greek government with a touch of schadenfreude. As this article in The Economist put it, how can the German government justify giving aid to Greece when Greek public sector employees get to retire earlier than German ones. Germany has for years been reforming its own welfare programme to save money while Greece has been happily pretending it could afford its bloated public sector workforce, going to the extent of fudging its statistics and outright lying to creditors about its liabilities.

It’s also worth remembering that the Haiti earthquake happened not too long ago and still needs money to rebuild. While it’s true that corruption and mismanagement played a part in the ineffectiveness of the Haitian government, exacerbating the damage caused by the quake, it’s impossible to argue that the quake was anything other than an accident that the Haitians had absolutely no control over. By contrast, an entire generation of Greeks was complicit in the decisions that led Greece into the mess that it currently finds itself in. How then is it morally justifiable to help the Greeks when there are so many other more worthwhile causes that require finite resources?

This blog post, again from The Economist, is very sympathetic towards the Greeks, but to me, they still reinforce the impression that the current problems are the result of specific choices made by the Greek government beginning in the 1980s. By successively voting for governments that continued those policies, the Greek people chose short-term wealth and growth without a care for whether or not these policies were sustainable, and so are complicit in them. Should they be saved from the results of their own choices?

Finally, shouldn’t the principles that apply to countries be equally applicable to individuals? I don’t begrudge the appeals for aid in cases where clearly the people involved have troubles that are none of their doing. Orphans come particularly to mind. But I do get annoyed when I see articles in the newspapers about how the government should be considerate towards people who have accumulated unsustainable levels of credit card debt or how richer people should contribute towards the welfare of those who have incurred responsibilities that they never had the ability to bear. Why should those who have worked hard to live within their means be punished and those have been short-sighted and irresponsible be rewarded?