Management or manipulation?

Managing public opinion falls squarely in the framework of a government's duties. This usually entails systematic public updates on the state of the country, on the goals being set, the efforts that will be made to accomplish them and the conditions under which this can be achieved. This is something the Kostas Simitis government did when it set the goal of getting Greece into the eurozone and succeeded (in contrast to New Democracy, which banked on a failure) but failed to do when it came to the issue of social security reform, which flopped. However, management is often nothing more than manipulation, overwhelmingly in the form of half-truths - a deluge of them.

The slowdown in developed economies should give us pause: if these economies are faltering, what will happen to a weaker economy like Greece's when the European "money tree" stops bearing fruit?

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