A little foresight

After a damning IMF report on the EU’s botching of the Greek financial crisis, a Eurocrat snootily commented that hindsight was all very well, but…. Had the EU shown a little foresight, it might not have landed us in the current disastrous mess.

Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the subject. The myth of Pro-metheus (‘Fore-sight’) and Epi-metheus (‘Hind-sight’) laid the foundations. Prometheus, principal champion of mortal men, warned Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from the gods. Epimetheus ignored the advice and was persuaded by Hermes to marry the luscious Pandora, who brought with her a jar filled with all the world’s evils. She foolishly opened it, leaving only hope inside for mortals to cling to. Greek tragedy was full of men like Oedipus, convinced they had got things right, only to find they had got them tragically wrong. The historian Herodotus painted Xerxes, king of the Persian army defeated in the Persian wars by the Greeks (481-479 bc), as a man surrounded by advisers and infallibly choosing the wrong option at every turn.

But was it ever possible to get things right? Athenian intellectuals thought, on balance, that it was. After all, careful prognosis enabled Greek doctors to foresee the course of a disease; and Greek sophists claimed that, by understanding how humans thought and reacted, the successful politician could always persuade people to his cause. So in the belief that human psychology could be understood and manipulated, the art of persuasion was widely taught. Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), saw in Pericles the exemplar of one who ‘knew what needed to be done’ and could persuade the Athenians to do it.

And the EU? In 1971 the great economist Harry Johnson published an article laying out the consequences of monetary integration.