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Private investors are acknowledging the reality that repayments will likely be drawn out, because insisting on existing terms could cause an untenable bunching of debt-service payments, with possibly unpleasant consequences.

Moreover, Irish GNP (the income accruing to its nationals, as distinct from foreign firms operating in Ireland) continues to shrink.

Crucially for Europe, world trade has been virtually stagnant in recent months. Global trade and economic performance in the eurozone appear to be dragging each other down.

Thus, the eurozone faces three choices: even more austerity for the heavily-indebted countries, socialization of the debt across Europe, or a creative re-profiling of debt, with investors forced to accept losses sooner or later.

Special European facilities, along with the IMF, lend money at below-market interest rates, which reduces the extent of austerity required. But the facilities’ resources are dwindling, and they certainly would not be sufficient if Spain and Italy were to seek support.

More ambitious pan-European efforts are embodied in various Eurobond proposals. These schemes imply socialization of debt – taxpayers elsewhere in Europe would share a country’s debt burden. These proposals, once in great vogue, have receded. Not surprisingly, the political opposition to such debt mutualization was intense.

Greece is one of the world's top 20 tourist destinations, traditionally drawing about half of its visitors from other European Union countries—especially from Germany and the U.K.

Prices are down some 15% from last year, according to SETE, following a 10% cut in rates charged by hotel and tour operators in 2011.

Leading German tour operator TUI AG says its Greek vacation bookings were down 30% up to March. European travel agency Thomas Cook TCG.LN +0.23% said German bookings for Greece so far are also down by 30% compared with 2011, despite discounts of as much as 20%.

Greece cannot hope to get its deficit under control fast enough to stabilize its debt and attract private lenders. Instead of remaining a permanent ward of Germany and the IMF, Greece should default on its debt, leave the euro zone, and return to a more competitive drachma.

But he should also make it clear that lending against private collateral should not be used by commercial banks to free up funds to purchase newly issued government bonds

As Italy shows its determination and its ability to reduce future deficits, it should be welcomed back to the capital markets.

But such a pact would be circumscribed to helping countries help themselves.

But government debt is still growing considerably. Doesn't this also increase the risk of inflation? Starbatty: That's what I assume. Inflation would be an elegant means of reducing debt, and many academics are discussing this scenario. But it becomes truly problematic when government bonds eventually lose their status as a safe haven. If China or Japan arrive at this conclusion and sell their bonds, a bubble could burst that is far more dangerous than any other bubble. If that happens, markets will plunge, and interest rates will shoot up.

Likewise, when it comes to assistance, I think we have a clear legal framework, according to which neither any member state nor the entire Union can be held liable for the debt of another member state.

Small companies in Spain and Italy pay more than 2 percentage points more for loans than their German counterparts, according to E.C.B. data.

The E.C.B. has already indicated that it will concentrate on buying bonds that mature within two or three years, rather than longer-term bonds.

These thoughts are spurred by the rather weak communique, which followed the meeting earlier last week of eurogroup finance ministers in Brussels,

There is, as yet, no mechanism in place to ensure bond market support to Spain and Italy and nobody, except the ECB, has the funds to keep their governments funded, should they be forced from the market. The ECB has suspended its bond-buying programme so the high-wire act continues, without a safety net.

As far as I am aware, this is the first time in the history of central banking that a sovereign state has been compelled, to the point of national insolvency, and by its own central bank (by our Government's choice, the ECB), to make whole those who foolishly purchased bonds issued by private banks, which had gone bust and been closed down.

But instead of funneling that money back into the Spanish and Greek economies as loans to cash-starved businesses and individuals, these banks have become the primary buyers of their governments’ bonds.

More importantly and less known to German taxpayers, Greece will also default on 155 billion euros directly owed to the euro system (comprised of the ECB and the 17 national central banks in the euro area). This includes 110 billion euros provided automatically to Greece through the Target2 payments system—which handles settlements between central banks for countries using the euro. As depositors and lenders flee Greek banks, someone needs to finance that capital flight, otherwise Greek banks would fail. This role is taken on by other euro area central banks, which have quietly lent large funds, with the balances reported in the Target2 account. The vast bulk of this lending is, in practice, done by the Bundesbank since capital flight mostly goes to Germany, although all members of the euro system share the losses if there are defaults.

No responsible bank would claim these sums are minor risks to its capital or to taxpayers. These claims also amount to 43 percent of German Gross Domestic Product,

Despite the suddenly easier terms under which Ireland and other recovering euro zone countries can borrow, the fact remains: These countries are still mired in stagnation.

And then there’s the Chinese. They arrived like a well-packed picnic, everything in shipping crates ready to be unpacked. Their own materials, their own equipment, their own workers, their own fences. If you were designing a foreign investment not to benefit the host community, this is what it would look like.

But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.

And that’s just the bureaucracy. Then there are the cops that pull you over to ask for 50 kwacha ($10); the schools with slots reserved for paying parents; the hospitals that swear the earliest appointment, the only available medicine, is six months away until you reach into your pocket.

But despite the lag in education, Mr. Johnson said, Mexican immigrants and their families don't have much trouble finding jobs. "One of the paradoxes of Mexican immigration is that you have these workers with low skills but incredibly high employment rates," he said. "The second generation isn't able to maintain employment levels that are quite so high, but they're basically in the same ballpark."

By contrast, the children of recent arrivals face competition from successive waves of immigrants from numerous regions.

Professor Waldinger said that "the median for Indian immigrants is 16 years of schooling" and that, on balance, "the Indians, the Koreans, the Chinese — they're already successful." One reason, he added, is that society is "much more open to outsiders" in top jobs and at elite colleges than it ever was before.

According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.

As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

“The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”

Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.

People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”

Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”

Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”

She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.

The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.

The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:

I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.

It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.

The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)

and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study).

In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate.

How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)