We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian, disciplinarian, on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no rules option.

Indeed, any political union that the Eurogroup would endorse today would be disciplinarian and ineffective. Meanwhile, the debt restructuring for which the eurozone not just Greece is crying out is unlikely to be politically acceptable in the current climate.

Ferguson s argument amounts to that of a brutal disciplinarian who claims vindication for his methods by pointing out that the victim is still alive. In pleading on behalf of British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, he points out that the UK economy grew by 2.6 last year (the best performing of the G 7 economies ), but ignores the damage that Osborne inflicted on the economy en route to this recovery.

So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this.