By David Wisner I’ve been thinking a lot about the American Declaration of Independence. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time business associate, is blind in one eye, owing...
By David Wisner Wolfgang Munchau is right, but for reasons he does not suspect. In his column in this past Monday’s Financial Times, Munchau laments the implications of this most recent round of Eurozone negotiations with Gre...
By David Wisner On days like this past Sunday (March 25) we celebrate the heroic exploits of our forebears. We characteristically posit that knowledge of such exploits constitutes one of the cornerstones of modern citizenship. ...
By David Wisner The crisis in Greece is political. Very few of the reforms the governments of George Papandreou and Lucas Papademos pledged to undertake in exchange for loans from the Troika have materialized. The evaluation of...
By David Wisner There is good news and bad news this week from the birthplace of democracy. On the one hand, according to findings from the European Values Study published by Tilburg University in Holland, more than 80% of tho...
By David Wisner Last November the Dukakis Center hosted an international symposium on political reform in Greece. We brought in a wide variety of distinguished practitioners, scholars, and journalists to engage in a frank publi...
The editors of Kathimerini write in today’s online English edition that “The prime minister knows better than anyone else how difficult the job ahead is, and how many problems he has to deal with… he is makin...
Nick Malkoutzis has a probing analysis of the circus act that is the current Greek Parliament in the English pages of Kathimerini. In this instance he writes about the debate this past Thursday over whom to investigate in the o...
By David Wisner I was interviewed on local TV some weeks back about possible ways out of the economic crisis that has gripped Greek society. Before closing out the interview the journalist asked me why, as a foreigner, I stay i...
Two very symptomatic editorials featured in the Sunday news, both tending to focus blame for Greece’s woes on specific elements in Greek society. In the first, an editorial in the New York Times by Kostas Vaxevanis, the e...
I read a tongue-in-cheek article by the wags at Reform Watch Greece some weeks ago which got me thinking about one of my favorite Balzac stories, Cesar Birotteau. The middle class has been decimated, so the argument goes, the p...
By David Wisner Politis has pointed this phenomenon up before. Newsworthy Grecians can no longer hide behind the figurative distance between Athens and the rest of the world, or the relative inaccessibility of the Greek languag...
By David Wisner I’ve been looking for an adjective with which to describe this recent op ed article by Bill Keller in the New York Times. Curious, perhaps. It’s not quite a celebration of a certain place where democ...
By Konstantinos Bouas and Petros Katsimardos Introduction Human Resource Management policy is probably the most important challenge for Greek public administration, given the severe on-going crisis and the need to sharply reduc...
By David Wisner Lecture given at Hamilton College, New York, September 2012 The title of my talk is: «The Crisis of the EU and the Future of Greece». It might well have been the inverse: «The Crisis in Greece and the Future ...
By Dimitris Diamantis and David Wisner “So many candidates, so little time to choose,” reported one interlocutor to us in early May. How can one decide about new parties and about personalities that had until recently resid...
By David Wisner Byzantine: …excessively complicated and detailed… (Oxford English Dictionary) I went to my local mall this past weekend. Malls are interesting places to observe human behavior, and it strikes me that they ma...