Look the main problem in this country is the public sector

A very interesting catch in The Battle for Greece by Alex Tabarrok.

This seems to me to be an excellent example of the issue of framing.

To understand what’s really going on, listen to this remarkable interview between NPR’s Robin Young and Nikolalos Voglis, a restaurant owner in Athens. The interview begins with a discussion of the crisis. No one has cash or credit and Voglis’s restaurant is basically shuttered. Young then asks Voglis how he will vote on Sunday and he replies, “Definitely, Yes.” Young is surprised, she tries to clarify, you will vote, “even for more austerity?” “That’s right,” he replies.

Following the conventional frame, Young finds this difficult to understand and she pushes back against Voglis with all the conventional arguments. She quotes Paul Krugman saying that the problem isn’t really Greece’s doing, that the IMF and EU are being too tough on Greece, that Greece has done a lot of cutting already and so on. Voglis responds:

We are on the right track but unfortunately the job wasn’t completed. We are a country in the European Community which has the biggest public sector in Europe. And all of us in the private sector spend millions to support the situation. So the only way that Greece can become a true Western country…is to make these reforms.

…Look the main problem in this country is the public sector. There is no other problem. Entrepreneurs here are very, very competitive. We have to let this thing, this monster that we call the public sector, it has to go, it has to finish. This is the main issue.

Our punditocracy and their enablers get lost in abstractions. They want good guys and bad guys and they want the bad guys to be othered as heartless. But sometimes there is no other. We are the problem and we have to solve it. I have no idea whether Voglis is representative of the Greek electorate. We'll find out soon. But it is interesting that there is such a clear clash between the conceptual abstractions of foreign reporters and pundits and the real world assessment from the participants.

It has been clear for several decades that Greece suffers from a fundamentally flawed governance structure. The crisis they are in is entirely self-generated by a series of kleptocratic and/or profligate administrations. It is the Greeks themselves who will bear the greatest pain before this is resolved and the resolution will not come with a new aid package. It will come when there is a responsible and responsive government that serves the interests of the whole nation and not just the favored rentseekers and the plutocrats.

NPR is in many ways a fine news organization but they are hostage to their own preconceptions and it colors everything they report. Not so much in overt biases but in terms of how things are framed and what topics are chosen to be reported on and what are omitted. To their institutional mind, of course this is a David and Goliath story between the poor Greek Government and the heartless Goliath of the EU and German Banks. This broadcast is an interesting instance where that preconception is unseated by actual people on the ground. The problem isn't the EU. It is the government itself.

Voglis' observation is true for many countries. Government has many important roles but the roles can be played well or poorly. With a monopoly of power and little competition, too often governments become ineffective or destructive in the roles they play. "Look the main problem in this country is the public sector."

UPDATE: See the comments to the article for a lot of useful additional insight.