Share This

Saturday, February 26, 2011

GDP does not equate happiness

WHAT ARE WE TO DO By TAN SRI LIN SEE-YAN



Headline: “Rising China tops Japan as world's No. 2”.

Looks like a big deal. Officially, the news came out of Tokyo two weeks ago when the Japanese government reported its economy shrank at a 1.1% annual rate in 4Q'10, a period when China's GDP surged 9.8% from a year earlier.

With those figures, Japan's full year GDP amounted to US$5.47 trillion, about 7% smaller than the US$5.88 trillion China reported in January. Japan's real GDP for the full year expanded by 3.9% (-6.3% in 2009); for China it's expected at 10.3% for 2010 as a whole, up from 9.2% in 2009. Thus China became the world's second largest economy in 2010, ending Japan's 42-year reign in that position.

It is something that is bound to happen considering China's ballooning GDP and much, much larger population - just a matter of arithmetic and time. While China's economy has several times in the past surpassed Japan's based on quarterly data, February 14's reading marks the first time China has done so on a full-year basis, the standard used for global rankings. Indeed, China's recent success over-shadows the fact that Japan's economy expanded for all of 2010.

Growth in the first nine months meant that even with the poor showing in 4Q'10, Japan's real GDP for the entire 2010 expanded at 3.9%.

Japan, China and the US

Still, Japan leads the pack among G-7 nations' growth surpassing Germany (3.6%), the US (2.9%) and Britain (1.4%). Lest it's forgotten, Japan remains dependent on exports. GDP growth could well fall off again if global trade tanks. That happened during the recent global crisis, when Japan's economy shrank 6.3% in 2009, the worst contraction among G-7 countries that year.

Hobbled by continuing weak domestic demand, Japan's economic output is still about 5% smaller in nominal terms than it was in 2008 despite the rebound in 2010. In contrast, the US economy is today 2% larger than it was in 2008. But both Japan and China together remain considerably smaller than the US economy: still worth 23% less (at US$11.35 trillion) than the US '10 GDP of US$14.66 trillion. Surely, the news marks the end of an era.

For two generations since overtaking West Germany in 1967, Japan stood solidly as the world's No. 2 economy. Even now, Japan ranks way ahead of Germany (4th), France (5th) and Britain (6th). The new rankings merely symbolise China's rise and Japan's decline as global growth engines. For the US, as I see it, while Japan was in a way an economic rival, it has been also a geopolitical and military ally. China, however, poses as a challenger on all fronts.

China should keep growing

But China remains in many ways poor. Whereas, Japan is an extremely wealthy nation. In terms of GDP per capita, Japan is No. 1 in Asia and No. 18 globally, between Canada and Germany according to the World Bank. Japan's success after WWII - the economic “miracle” underpinned by annual growth rates averaging 10% in 60s and 5% in the 70s is still looked-up to by much of the world.

China still lags behind Japan in many respects in the face of a reality that their growing interdependence makes them partners as well as rivals. By comparison, China's income per capita (at US$4,400) is only one-tenth of Japan's. World Bank estimates that more than 100 million people - nearly Japan's entire population - live on less than US$2 a day. Size of course matters.

If you look at China's development, its standard of living is much like Thailand, even Indonesia. But if you look at China's mere size, besides being now the world's No. 2 economy, it's also its largest exporter (counting euro-zone members separately); second largest importer; largest surplus nation (with current surplus peaking at 11% of GDP); and largest holder of the world's stock of foreign currency reserves (equivalent to 50% of its GDP). China's economy probably will surpass US in outright size within 20 years. But, quite obviously, the GDP landmark can't reflect the true condition of the Chinese society, which a friend of mine at Bei-ta described as “rich country, poor people.”

Still, China's continuing rapid growth points out the stark contrast with the US and euro-zone economies which are still struggling to maintain growth and revive employment. US share of global output (20%), trade (11%) and even financial assets (30%) is shrinking, as emerging nations continue to flourish.

China's strong performance is in some ways good for the global economy. It reflects rising demand for Chinese goods in the US and elsewhere. China's exports rose 31% in 2010, but its imports rose even faster at 38%. As China overtakes Japan, it also boosts its growth: Japanese exports to China hit a record 13,000 trillion in 2010. Indeed, the rapidly growing Chinese market for a wide range of products (from cars & SUVs to high-tech electronics to Chinese tourists) is galvanising corporate Japan and the rest of Asia. China surpassed US as Japan's largest trading partner in 2009. Masayoshi Son (CEO, Softbank) expects “China's GDP to double Japan's in eight years.”

As of now, many in Japan and Asia view China's growing economic clout as benefitting all of Asia. Indeed, continued growth in China as well as some pick-up in the US is expected to help Japan bounce back in 1H 2011.

Redefining challenges

China's official rise to become Asia's top economy takes the spotlight off Tokyo. While some Japanese elite now looks back to the era of Japan bashing with “nostalgia”, others found a new opportunity to help redefine Japan's image as No. 3. I well recall a recent Asian Wall Street Journal write-up on the book “Do We Have to be No. 1?” by Renho (a ruling-party politician) who suggested that Japanese should take comfort in the notion that Japan need not be a leader in everything (or anything) to be deemed successful.

Her notion of Japan as a centre of creativity and innovation (e.g. hybrid cars, 3-D video games), in contrast to its image 30 years ago as a copycat and later, outperformed the originals with excellent design, manufacturing and craftsmanship. That label is now passed-on to China. It's a matter of quality over quantity: “Japan is still a wealthy nation in many sense of the word.”

China continues to grapple with challenges in achieving rapid, widely-shared and sustainable growth. Meanwhile, the rest of the world must learn to adjust to China's growing impact. In the aftermath of the global crisis, however, it is a rising China that feels time is on its side. Something rather Chinese considering its 6,000 odd years of history.

Like it or not, US & China's economies are indeed deeply enmeshed - not at all a zero-sum game. To many Chinese (most are cool pragmatists), US will retain unchallengeable global power for the next generation, at least - given US capacity to adjust, innovate and restore its dominance. In the meantime, Chinese attitudes have also changed in a world as it sees it today. There are already indications that the young are growing impatient and increasingly ignoring the advice of Deng Xiaoping (architect of modern China) to “hide our capacities; bide our timenever claim leadership.” China still has much to do just to keep pace with the people's aspirations for higher incomes and higher living standards.

More to life than money

I first met Simon Kuznets at Harvard in the summer of '69 (won the Nobel Prize in economics two years later). A small but impressive man with piercing eyes, he educated me with rare insights into development economics. Also taught me there is more to life than money: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” He should know - he invented national accounts and built them for the US. So he knew their limits. Fourty years on where Kuznets led, others have followed including Presidents Obama (US) and Sarkozy (France) and Cameron (Britain Prime Minister).

Cameron sums it best: “we need to look for alternative measures that would show national progress not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.”

In the 60s, Robert Kennedy criticised GDP as measuring everything (including pollution, cigarette advertising, napalm & nuclear warheads) “except that which makes life worthwhile (the arts, wit, wisdom, compassion).”
Similar concerns underpinned the 2008 Commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress set-up by Sarkozy and led by Nobel laureates Stiglitz and Sen.

It concluded that the level of GDP per capita was far from the best measure of material living standards.
They emphasised greater usage of net national income (i.e. after adjusting for depreciation of capital, including infrastructure); stress more on the household instead of economy-wide measures; showcase distribution of income and consumption; and evaluate non-market activities, including leisure.

The second stage is to combine new measures of wellbeing (health, education, governance, environmental sustainability, and subjective measures of quality of life) into a single summary measure. The challenge remains how to summarise overall well-being using a simple set of indicators that most can understand and use.

Pursuit of happiness

The trouble is people do quite poorly at predicting what makes them happy. They focus too much on initial responses and overlook how fleeting moments of pleasure are, leaving them no happier than before. Granted many studies have shown that wealthier nations tend to be happier than poorer ones; and rich people appear more satisfied than the less affluent. Yet, other studies on the US and South Korea suggest people are no happier than they were 50 years ago despite sharp rises in income per capita.

A recent Canadian study concluded the happiest people reside in the poorest provinces (Nova Scotia), while those in the richest (British Columbia) were among the least happy. Since happiness is what people finally want and wealth is only a means towards this end, Prof. D. Bok (former Harvard President) made it known “the primacy now accorded to economic growth would appear to be a mistake.”

Based on latest research findings, two conclusions have emerged: (i) things that bring enduring satisfaction for individuals are also good for most others (e.g. helping others, close relationships); (ii) experiences that bring lasting happiness do not feature as priority in government (e.g. medical afflictions, such as chronic pain, depression, sleep disorders, give vast relief to sufferers once treated, but such people are often under-served in hospitals).

But are happiness research really reliable enough as inputs for public policy? For sure, people who claim to be happy tend to live longer, are less prune to commit suicide, don't abuse drugs, get promoted more often and enjoy good friends. Their assessment of their own well-being lines-up rather well with the views of friends and family. Researchers found that answers to questions about their well-being seem to correspond fairly well to more objective evidence.

Be that as it may, it's still premature to initiate new bold policies on happiness based on research alone. Nevertheless, they can be useful in assigning priorities or identifying new possibilities for public intervention. At the very least, like Britain and France, governments should collect and publish regular data on trends in the well-being of citizens. Perhaps, public officials may even use these research insights as a basis for informed decisions. Surely, you can't go wrong with prioritising happiness.

Former banker, Dr Lin is a Harvard educated economist and a British Chartered Scientist who now spends time writing, teaching & promoting the public interest. Feedback is most welcome; email: starbizweek@thestar.com.my.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Tapping the Innovative Masses




Where does most product innovation come from? You might look for it in the R&D units of consumer-product manufacturers, but you'd be better off checking the basement workshop of your next-door neighbor. In a survey conducted in the U.K. last year, MIT's Eric von Hippel and colleagues found evidence that that the amount of money consumers spent tweaking products dwarfed the R&D outlays by all British consumer-product firms combined. David Talbot, Technology Review's chief correspondent, recently asked von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at the Sloan School of Management, what lessons he gleaned from the survey on how companies can recognize and tap the power of user innovation.

TR: You surveyed 1,173 U.K. adults about their product-tinkering and inventive habits. What did you find?

Von Hippel: We found that 6.2 percent—representing 2.9 million people, or two orders of magnitude more than are employed as product developers in the U.K.—created or modified consumer products over the past three years and spent 2.3 billion pounds per year, more than double what the U.K. firms spent on consumer-product R&D.

What sorts of things were they doing?
 
Our surveyors found people who reprogrammed their washing machines to create a spin-only cycle, modified dog bowls so they wouldn't slide around the floor when the dog ate, built treetop trimmers based on a fishing rod and line, and reprogrammed their GPS gadgets for better usability.

We all know people who are tinkerers. What's new in your findings?

What's remarkable is the scale and scope of it, and that it's been unrecognized. Basically, nobody ever expected that consumers innovate. It's not in economic theory. It's not in policymaking. The traditional model that has been in place since 1934 [the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published The Theory of Economic Development that year] is that producers are the innovators. Schumpeter even argued that producers, by what they offer, create user needs. Because there was an assumption that producers were innovators, nobody looked at individual consumers to see if they innovated. Now that we've taken a look, we find out it's twice as large as producer innovation in consumer categories.

Aren't companies already adopting these kinds of user innovations?

The normal method for innovating in a firm is to do market research in the target market, and then do in-house product development. The problem is that market researchers often disregard solutions contained in what users told them. If users said "I came up with a better way to do X," market research would convert that into "So-and-so needs a better way to do X," and ignore the user-developed solution. After all, they would think, "It's R&D's job—not the consumers' job—to find the solution."

That sounds like something from a Dilbert cartoon.

Well, yes, I guess it does have that entertainingly perverse quality.

Besides your survey, what other evidence has emerged for broad user innovation?


The Internet has made user innovation much more visible. You might know privately about your Uncle Joe modifying something in his basement. But when you start to see consumer innovation on the Web—on sites [about topics] ranging from software improvements to John Deere garden-tractor hacks—then it starts to strike you as a category.

Why do companies ignore this?


For many years it has been very difficult to convince people of the increasing importance of new product and service development by users serving their own needs. Part of the reason is that the ongoing shift from producer to user innovation is also a paradigm shift. User innovation does not fit into the traditional, producer-centered paradigm. Until people understand the new paradigm, even though user innovation is in plain sight, it can be invisible to them.

So how can companies understand this trend and know where to look for good ideas?


The key take-home is that they should look for innovators in the leading edge of markets, instead of ordinary consumers. In other words, if you have someone who has an intense need today for something, those are the ones who will innovate. Tim Berners-Lee was at CERN and had an intense need for networking. So he created the World Wide Web. Microsoft didn't think people had this need, because they served average consumers.

 Once companies have found somebody's solution, what comes next?


You have to be open to those outside solutions, which R&D often isn't. Not only do you have to change market research processes—and look at the outliers, the leading edge—but you have to then adapt R&D processes to build upon user-developed solutions rather than starting from scratch. I have a free, how-to-do-it book on my website explaining how to implement lead-user innovation processes for any who are interested.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Another Malaysians best in the world

Duo score highest in ICAEW exam

Duo score highest in ICAEW exam



PETALING JAYA: Two Malaysians shared top honours in the internationally recognised Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) Financial Accounting paper in 2010.

Their wins brought the number of prizes awarded to Malaysians last year to three. In June, An Li Fong had scored the highest marks in the Audit and Assurance examination. Kwong Sze Hui and Teh Qian Yuen, both 20, scored the highest marks in the Financial Accounting paper, ahead of almost 900 students across the world and 64 in Malaysia.

Sponsored by the world’s fifth largest accountancy and advisory services network BDO, Kwong and Teh were two of the top accounting students studying for the leading Accredited Chartered Accountant (ACA) qualification in Malaysia with Sunway-TES.

A total of eight prizes have been won by Malaysians since 2004, ICAEW said in a statement yesterday.

Number crunchers: Gan (centre) posing with the ICAEW examination joint first place winners Teh (left) and Kwong.

Kwong and Teh garnered joint first place and the Spicer and Pegler prize with their BDO colleague Sam Moore of Huddersfield, Britain.

BDO Malaysia managing partner Datuk Gan Ah Tee lauded the duo’s achievements as a reflection of their drive to become global accounting professionals.

“They have demonstrated their commitment to excellence and this augurs well with BDO’s continued strategy to support human resources development.

“Our intention to provide opportunities for young, deserving Malaysian students to become global professionals through the BDO sponsorship programme continues to be well on its way,” Gan said.

ICAEW is an international accountancy body which provides training and support to over 134,000 members in 160 countries.

It is also a founding member of the Global Accounting Alliance with over 775,000 members worldwide.

It has been 70 good years, Mr Opposition

COMMENT By BARADAN KUPPUSAMY



DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang has been a defender and promoter of democracy, human rights, justice and equality. He remains the government’s leading critic.

DAP members and leaders have annually been marking the birthday of party adviser and undisputed leader Lim Kit Siang, who turned 70 on Sunday.

Where before his birthdays were low key and celebrated only among the inner circle, now big dinners and speeches are in order. Not only are the circumstances different, but the DAP has also grown rapidly in size after the tsunami of 2008 which changed the political landscape of the country and propelled it from a tight-knit opposition party into the ruling government in five states.

For hardcore DAP members, Lim is the man who made it all possible. The man who kept the party together during the long years of hardship; the man who went into ISA detention; the man who sacrificed for the party; and also the man who finally crowned it all with the 2008 successes.

Lim, who gave up an early career as a journalist, is as active in politics now as he was in 1966 when, as a 25-year-old youth, his career first took off after he became the national organising secretary of the DAP.

In the 45 years since, Lim has been a permanent fixture in national politics as the “Mr Opposition” in parliament, taking over the title from Tan Sri Tan Chee Koon, the opposition stalwart of an earlier era.
Lim, the MP for Ipoh Timur, remains the government’s leading critic, as he had been when first elected to parliament as MP for Bandar Melaka in 1969.

In the intervening years, he also grew into the job becoming the country’s leading defender and promoter of democracy, human rights, justice and equality. All his ideals are best encapsulated in the DAP’s long struggle under his leadership for a Malaysian Malaysia.

In that time too, Lim, born in Batu Pahat, Johor, in 1941, ruled the DAP with an iron fist, tolerating little dissent and keeping his flock in a tight circle around him to fend off the party’s many political enemies and survive numerous threats and challenges.

Lim managed to steer the DAP through endless upheavals like ISA arrests, election defeats, defections and show trials to survive and eventually prosper with the 2008 tsunami that brought the DAP from the cold into the government.

It was also under Lim’s watch that the DAP won 29 seats in parliament, its best ever showing and took Penang, defeating arch rivals Gerakan and MCA in a spectacular manner.

Lim’s crowning glory in five decades of relentless politics is to see his son, Guan Eng, capture Penang and become its chief minister, something Lim himself had tried to do for two decades and failed.

Lim took over an incipient DAP, a wing of the Singapore’s PAP after separation in 1965, and nurtured it into the country’s leading multi-racial and secular opposition party.

The DAP successfully filled the big political vacuum left behind by state action against left wing political parties like the Socialist Front and the Labour Party.

Although Lim tried to change its image in his two decades as party secretary-general until 1999 and later as chairman and adviser, the DAP remains mostly a Chinese party with very little Malay grassroots participation.
The failure to attract Malays is hampering the party’s growth as a national, multi-racial party with the potential to rule the country like the PKR.

Thus, the DAP, although a major partner in Pakatan Rakyat and a player in parliament and national politics, has to defer to a politically weaker and splintered PKR. Lim has developed a special relationship with PAS, each hoping to ride on the other’s coat-tails to Federal power.

Lim’s career is one upheaval after another but he faced his greatest defeat in the 1999 general election when Chinese voters, out of fear of an Islamic theocracy, punished the DAP. Lim himself lost in Penang but he bounced back in 2004 winning the Ipoh Timur seat.

His greatest achievement is taking the DAP back into an alliance with PAS but this time with the PKR led by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim taking the lead role and assuring Chinese voters and others that the grouping that later became Pakatan Rakyat, is a safe bet.

After 45 years in opposition politics and after publishing over 30 books, Lim is an enigma.

While his political career is well-documented, only the bare outlines of his early life and his family is known even to his closest political allies except that he traces his ancestry to Zhang Zhou village in Fujian province which he visited in 2008.

Very little is known about his parents, his siblings, his early life and schooling and what really pushed him into politics. Lim has written about politics but not himself.

Lim is getting old and in apparent retirement after handing over effective power to others including in stages to his son, Guan Eng. Nevertheless, he wields tremendous moral authority and is the one person everybody defers to in the DAP.

“Lim’s role now in the DAP is to make sure the party stays united and behind Guan Eng as the acknowledged heir,” said a DAP MP who declined to be identified.

“He keeps an eye on everything and everybody and intervenes when necessary,” the MP said, citing recent squabbles between party leaders and factions in last year’s party elections as occasions when Lim had stepped in to keep unity and discipline.

As Lim ages, a new DAP is also taking shape. Success has attracted new members with the DAP growing to about three times its original size.

It has also brought new challenges to the party like power struggles over sharing portfolios and government largesse, allegations of corruption and a growing and restive grassroots.

While the DAP changes significantly, power in the party remains in the hands of an inner circle that is beholden to Lim.

With such deference, and given the tremendous moral authority he wields, Lim continues to be the effective ruler and final arbitrator in the DAP.

There is no let up for Lim even after turning 70.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Zairil Khir is Guan Eng’s aide

By LOH FOON FONG newsdesk@thestar.com.my


KUALA LUMPUR: Zairil Khir Johari (pic), the son of the late former Education Minister Tan Sri Mohd Khir Johari, has been appointed the political secretary to the DAP secretary-general.




Lim Guan Eng said that Zairil, 28, who joined the party six months ago, would be based at the DAP secretariat here and assist him with political matters at the party and national level.




“He is also learned, especially in international relations and diplomacy.

“He just happens to be a Malay,” Lim said when asked if Zairil was appointed to en­­courage more Malays to join DAP.

Lim added that DAP had always reached out to people of various races and was not anti-Malay as some had propagated.

“Competency is race-blind and not race-specific,” he said. He added that his children’s doctor was a Malay but he was the best.

Zairil, a father of one, has a Masters in Arts in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the Univer­sity of London.

He also has a degree in information systems engineering and was a chocolate making entrepreneur.
He introduced full-coloured chocolate printing technology in Malaysia.

Zairil, from Penang, said he had been observing DAP for some time before joining the party. He hoped to help DAP achieve its goal for an equitable Malaysia for all races.

“Politics has always been my passion. “I share the views of many young people that Malaysia is going in the wrong way.

“I want to do something about it,” he said.

Europe’s Job From Hell

Madman Is Wanted to Fill Europe’s Job From Hell
by Matthew Lynn



Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — It comes with a nice office and a grand title. You would probably have a pretty generous expense account. And there may well be a lucrative consulting gig with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. when it is all over.

Even so, you would have to be bordering on insanity to accept the role of European Central Bank president when Jean- Claude Trichet steps down in October this year.

It’s the job from hell. The euro crisis is getting worse. You will be asked to achieve the impossible. You will have zero independence. And the chances are that you will wind up being remembered as the person who presided over one of the biggest monetary failures in history. That’s hardly an appealing prospect.

When Axel Weber unexpectedly resigned as Bundesbank president this month, the favorite to take over from the usually calm and confident Trichet was suddenly out of the running.

The field is now wide open. Mario Draghi, the Bank of Italy governor, has been installed by the bookmakers as most likely to get the job. He is followed by Erkki Liikanen, the Finnish central banker, who is now at odds of 2-1, followed by Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch, and Dutchman Nout Wellink. An outsider at 20-1 is another German, Klaus Regling, the head of Europe’s bailout fund. It could even be another Frenchman — Xavier Musca, the economics adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has been mentioned as a possibility.

Euro Mess

Yet surely any job would be preferable to running the ECB. Greek finance minister, for example. Or running the public relations unit for BP Plc on the Gulf coast. Either would be better than trying to sort out the mess the euro has become.

Here’s why.

First, the crisis ebbs and flows. But the only real fix is for the economies of the 17 members to converge, and there is no sign of that. Germany is booming, and the peripheral countries are slumped in recession. The German economy will expand 2.3 percent this year, according to the government. By contrast, the Greek economy shrank 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter alone. From a year earlier, its economy contracted 6.6 percent.

The difference in growth rates between Germany and the worst performing countries is now close to nine percentage points. In effect, the imbalances are widening — and that means the crisis is becoming more severe.

Inflation Lurks

Second, the new ECB president will be asked to achieve the impossible. The central bank is mandated to keep consumer-price increases at just below 2 percent. In January, the euro area’s inflation rate was already 2.4 percent. Thomas Straubhaar, director of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, says German inflation will reach 4 percent by the end of 2012. Price pressures are growing everywhere, and at some point the ECB will have to act.

That will plunge the struggling nations into a depression. What happens to an economy that has already contracted more than 6 percent in the past year when you boost interest rates? You create a full-blown depression — 1931 will seem mild by comparison. They will burn your effigy in Athens and Dublin. You can’t maintain price stability and rescue the peripheral nations, but that’s what you will be asked to do.

Three, the bank’s independence is about to be compromised. The euro area’s leaders will struggle to keep the single currency together. They have invested too much capital in this project to let it fail. They will come up with a dozen plans and trillions of euros in rescue packages. The chances of the ECB maintaining its independence during that process are zero.

Let Inflation Rip

If you need to print money to keep the euro intact, you will have to turn on the presses. If you have to prop up bankrupt banks, the euros will have to be made available. If you need to cut interest rates and let inflation rip, you will have to ignore your mandate for price stability. The ECB president will end up having to do what French and German politicians tell him, regardless of whether it makes any economic sense.

Four, you will probably end up presiding over the dismemberment of the euro. This is an eight-year term. Whoever gets the job will still be there in 2019. It is hard to see the single currency surviving that long without one or more countries leaving. The pressures within the system are too great to be contained. Who wants to be remembered as the person who presided over one of the great monetary failures in history?

They will probably find someone to take the job. There’s always someone who wants a promotion.
But Axel Weber was a candidate of stature, just what the ECB needs. He walked away from the gig. The other candidates are now taking a good hard look at the job description.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author of “Bust,” a book on the Greek debt crisis. The opinions expressed are his own.)