My daughter is trying to buy tickets for next year’s Olympics, which will be held only a few miles from where we live. The process is complicated — too complicated for me to have registered more than a passing interest. Eight million tickets are being sold for events that range from sailing to shooting, at prices from £20 to £2,000 each, depending on the seat and the event; a front row seat near the finishing tape of the 100 metre finals, for example, will obviously be dearer than one offering a distant view of the archery. Trying to ensure fairness — or that was the idea — the Olympic organizers opened a website and invited applications by credit card, with tickets for over-subscribed events to be decided by lottery. The more tickets you bid for, therefore, the greater the chance you stood of winning a few. Some people tried for £10,000 worth — say a hundred middle-range seats — and ended up with ten. Others, including my daughter, tried for a £400 worth and got none.

That was in March. Another load of tickets was put up for sale in June, intended for those who’d been unlucky in the first round. My 18-year-old daughter got out of bed at 5.45 am — an unusual, possibly unique, event — so that she could be among the first to start tapping at her keyboard when the box office opened. No luck this time either. There was so much traffic that the site jammed. At the moment, it looks as though my daughter, who has a genuine interest in athletics and used to run for her school, will get no closer to the Olympics than the TV in our living room, even though the stadium is only a couple of stops by train from our house.

Well, so what? Isn’t it just the luck of the draw? Yes and no. On the one hand, many people much more deserving than my daughter have been just as unsuccessful — a list that includes retired Olympic medalists and their relations. On the other hand, Lakshmi Mittal has successfully bought 5,000 tickets. As Mittal is Britain’s richest man — worth about £30 billion at the last count — the Biblical junction is hard to resist: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.”

So what did he do to earn this allocation, which works out at around 320 of the best seats every day? Is he known for his lifetime interest in the pentathlon, synchronized swimming or the marathon? Not a chance. Mittal secured his ticket allocation by spending £10 million on Anish Kapoor’s monstrous steel tower, to be known as the ‘ArcelorMittal Orbit’ — which will rise 115 metres above the Olympic park. This, plus a loan of £9.6 million, made him an official Olympic sponsor. As what’s known as a ‘Domestic Tier Two Supporter’, he has the buying rights to 5,000 seats. But it would be wrong to single him out. ‘Tier One’ sponsors, who include British Airways, BP, Adidas and BMW, get even more. They would argue that this is only fair — it’s the price of their subsidy. The unsuccessful ticket buyer, however, is left with the impression that the games are intended less for athletics enthusiasts than for international businesses to entertain their executives and schmooze their clients.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. When London won the Olympic bid six years ago, politicians stressed how the games would reach out to young people and transform the economy of the city’s less privileged east end. Everybody realized that the spectacle of Beijing in 2008 was impossible to emulate, so the London games would play to other strengths: less majesty but more fun, easier access for local people, local jobs, ‘greener’ technology. Many of these promises won’t be fulfilled. The venues, costing £10 billion in public money, are mainly being built by foreign labour. There will be no wind or water turbines to generate the electricity. The only credit card acceptable on site will be that of another sponsor, Visa. Roads will be cleared of other traffic so that the convoys of black cars carrying VIPs can reach the events from their central London hotels on time. In other words, these games will be the Olympics as usual, meshing marketing, money, sport and politics to create a gigantic but fleeting piece of theatre that leaves a hole in the national budget. Still, the weight of publicity and expectation is irresistible. I cross my fingers for my daughter and the thousands like her and hope that they somehow get in.

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Five or six years ago I did some publishing business with a family firm in Athens, three brothers who wanted to translate English literary fiction into Greek. They were hospitable and generous. They took care of all the travel and hotel expenses, and threw a couple of elegant parties in my honour, and sent me several big tins of olive oil that came from the family estate. Thanks to them, I learned the little I know about modern Greece.

One day, I asked them about their olive groves. Greek olive oil is considered by some connoisseurs to be the best in Europe, made on a smaller scale and with more traditional methods than in Italy and Spain. Did Greek villagers still pick the olives? “Oh no,” one of the brothers said, “that’s all done by immigrants. Ours are from Bulgaria. You won’t find many Greeks picking olives these days.”

I accepted his answer as just another mystery of the European economy in its pre-crash era. There were quite a few of them. In Ireland, which 20 years before had been one of Europe’s poorest countries, property prices were outpacing those in England. Iceland, whose fortunes had previously depended on the codfish, now had billionaire entrepreneurs who owned London hotels, department stores and a Premier League football club. As for my own country, financial riddles cropped up everywhere. How was it that so many us could now afford retirement homes in Spain, Land Rovers, fees for private schools? The questions differed a little from country to country, but they boiled down to the same thing: where did the money come from? If Greeks weren’t picking olives any longer, then how were they earning a living?

We know now. The money was borrowed, both by individuals and by highly leveraged companies that speculated in property and retail bubbles. Banking supervision was lax. In small societies such as Ireland and Iceland, bankers, speculators and governments were corruptly entwined. As to Greece, it lied about its debts when it joined the euro in 1999, drew huge loans from French and German banks and set about expanding and improving its public sector, so that wages and employment went up and (for example) a Greek civil servant could retire in his fifties on 80 per cent of his salary. As a career choice, what olive grove could compete?

Today, Greece is in a turmoil of street protests and violent rioting. The conditions set by the EU and the IMF for their bailouts have imposed an austerity programme, slashing wages and jobs and increasing taxation, that any democratic government would be lucky to survive. Similar problems, though not so severe, threaten Portugal and Spain. Even convinced Europhiles now wonder if the euro can last as the currency of the 17 countries that adopted it (which Britain didn’t, to its present relief). Restoring previous currencies — the drachma, in Greece’s case — would be messy, but it would allow countries to restore some of their financial independence, to devalue and set their own interest rates and reduce the value of their debts. It would also be the post-war Europe’s largest catastrophe and an unmistakable signal of the continent’s dwindling power.

It’s too easy, however, to blame the spendthrift and feckless Greeks, which the Germans do on a daily basis. Greece, after all, didn’t invent the euro. That happened among the European elite: the bureaucrats, bankers and politicians who imagined that imposing a single currency with a single interest rate across Europe’s diverse economies, each with its own fiscal policies and banking systems, was somehow a sound idea. Political union should have preceded monetary union; that’s the common wisdom now, but the fond hope at the time was that the second would bring about the first. Instead, the euro’s troubles have made political union a more distant prospect than ever.

The euro, then, is another mystery of the pre-crash era. How come so many people were suckered into believing it would work? I don’t think I was one of them — maybe only for the sentimental reason that I like to see the Queen’s head on sterling notes — but the confidence emerging in those days from Brussels was persuasive to all but a minority of economists (including, it should be said, Amartya Sen). The ancient Greeks had a word for it: hubris. A perceptive civilization once upon a time, even though it did invent the Olympic Games.