Being Greek and an Economist while Greece is Burning! An intimate account of a peculiar tragedy

The crisis that erupted in Wall Street in the fall of 2008 has had some bizarre side effects. One of them was to push small, inconsequential Greece onto the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers and make it a permanent feature in the nightmares of peoples and policy-makers worldwide. Another was the paradox of amplifying Greek voices during the country’s economic implosion while, at once, denying them analytical authority over their predicament. The paper is a personal account of this paradox as experienced by a Greek economist who also lives through another, more personal, paradox: despite his portrayal by the media as an “expert,” he has been advocating that economists, independently of their intelligence or personal ethics, belong to a sinister priesthood purveying thinly disguised (and heavily mathematized) superstition as scientific economics.