If your only ambition is to go from terrible to mediocre — to get your country off the international business pages so it can suffer in anonymity — then you can perhaps argue that most things can remain the same, and all you need is a few small tweaks to the existing status quo. In actual practice this usually doesn’t work, and not even mediocrity is achieved, but the idea seems plausible.
But, if your ambition is a little higher, it soon becomes obvious that doing things mostly the same way will produce mostly the same results. I suggest that Greece’s new Syriza government should embrace the idea of becoming the wealthiest country in the eurozone – yes, wealthier than Germany – in perhaps twenty years. Even if they fail, the result would still probably be pretty good.
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