“Antitheses” brought the television season to a close with a revealing interview featuring the most influential scientist of the Greek world in the first quarter of the 21st century, drawing on scientific references and delivering his always discerning and interdisciplinary public discourse.
”The Scarred Face of Greece Today: Objective Data and International Comparisons, Under a Regime of Incompetence,” as argued by Ioannis P.A. Ioannidis, professor of Pathology, Epidemiology, Population Health, and Data Science, director of the Center for Meta-Research Innovation (METRICS), and holder of the George E. and Lucy Becker Chair at Stanford University.
-Demographics: Births in Greece are half the number of deaths; emigration; an aging population; a relative decline; low healthy life expectancy; heat waves/fires/toxic clouds, and seasonal spikes in deaths.
-Health: A National Health System being undermined, skyrocketing out-of-pocket expenses for patients, health risks, and an unfavorable health profile among adolescents and young adults, a shortage of primary care physicians, toxic medical practices, and polypharmacy—why are we world champions in expensive tests and C-sections?;
-Cost of living, social conditions, and well-being/happiness; socioeconomic dimensions of health; the real cost of living; the erosion of democratic institutions; significant restrictions on press freedom, corruption—why don’t you have the freedom in Greece to make choices about your own life?;
-Science: Lack of trust in scientists, artificial growth in research, minimal added value in manufacturing, negligible funding for public universities, public funding of private companies, biases in science, private universities, the true extent and worsening of the brain drain, the role of artificial intelligence—opportunities, challenges, and dystopias for societies.
-Where does Greece rank very high globally? In weapons that serve no purpose and cheap tourism, from which foreign companies reap the profits.
-Nepotism, kleptocracy, family rule, mediocrity, incompetence: interconnected elements of the “success story” in the land of the Frappé. Communication policy and the debasement of institutions. Art and intellectual life in a country of complacent people.
-Greece nowhere, everywhere: Princess Laskarina Vatatzis at Sé Velha, the statues are on Museum Island, Greek artifacts in the palaces of the Joseon dynasty, the Toccata for the Girl with the Burned Face—why did we betray our children? ;
