The following is how Michael Lewis had written about Greek's original sin.
"As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went
out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was
turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and
give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past
twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in
real terms--and that number doesn't take into account the bribes
collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost
three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has
annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of
400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average
state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a
successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos
pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece's rail
passengers into taxicabs: it's still true. "We have a railroad company
which is bankrupt beyond comprehension," Manos put it to me. "And yet
there isn't a single private company in Greece with that kind of
average pay." The Greek public-school system is the site of
breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe,
it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the
highest-ranked, Finland's. Greeks who send their children to public
schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to
make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-
owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in
debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs
classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty
for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel
out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow
managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio
announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public
health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European
average--and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses
and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels
and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply
closets.
Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn't matter; the one masks
and thus enables the other. It's simply assumed, for instance, that
anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People
who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors
to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent
their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-
million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.
Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach."
How much has Greek changed?
I think I can sum it up in three words: "CORRUPTION, CORRUPTION, CORRUPTION."
I mean, we have corruption all over but it works differently, like in public works. They do unnecessary work over and over, and they never finish. People struggle to survive but someone is putting big chunks of money in their pocket.