Lobster pasta in troubled times
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lobster pasta seems to be back on the menu in many places, back in vogue. The question is whether this means that we’re also back to the good old days of abundance. Growth is good for the country and its citizens. Growth generates wealth and this should be the goal. As we have already experienced unfettered growth in the past, however, and been through a period of voracious consumption, ostentatious spending, pirate capitalism, with a complete lack of restraint or moderation, it would be good to remember how that period of seemingly endless prosperity ended.
Like a tightly wound coil, the Greek economy is bouncing back from a long period of contraction. It is amazing that we went from having record unemployment to businesses not being able to find enough staff. The investments being made in tourism, real estate and energy are significant. Major foreign firms are taking the plunge after decades of skepticism and investing in Greece, while others, spooked by the prospect of instability, are waiting for the election results. A new generation of entrepreneurs is emerging that appears to be driven and professional – just look at the tourism sector and all the small export-oriented companies that survived the crisis and keep increasing their turnover.
All that said, there’s also a lot of “easy” money going around. A lot of cash was injected into the market during the Covid lockdowns. Some went into productive investments, some squandered on bells and whistles. There are plenty of examples of both: from the restaurateur who bought a new kitchen and ventilation equipment to the owner of a parking lot who got way more than his due and spent it on showing off to the neighbors. There’s also all the money in the shadow economy, which no troika has been able to tame. We all wonder where so much money – without obvious provenance or identity – is coming from. Who are all those guys with huge SUVs with flashing lights or those who control the big offshore company we once knew as Mykonos?
Sure, lobster pasta is a delicious dish and we shouldn’t demonize it. But a return to the days of plenty driven by easy or undeclared money, by money that has come from state coffers, is something that should frighten us. It should frighten us because these are very turbulent times, and things that may have been tolerated 20 years ago can cause strong reactions in society, even explosions. But also because we’ve already had our fill – and it stuck in our gullets, coming at an awful cost.
