Suppose senior government officials in Greece had concluded that the euro was a failed experiment, that the rest of the continent would never extend reasonable terms to their country and would instead doom it to perpetual recession, and that the only way to save Greece from disaster -- and Europe, too -- was to begin the process of unwinding the common currency.

They'd have encountered a major obstacle to leaving the euro: Greeks really like it. To get rid of it, the country's leaders would have had just one option: sabotage negotiations with the creditors, blame them for being unreasonable, and then eventually tell voters that Greece has no choice but to go back to the drachma.

If that's the Greek strategy, as Simon Nixon speculates in The Wall Street Journal, it seems to be working:

If [Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras had set out in January to take Greece out of the eurozone, it is very hard to think of anything he would have done differently. He won the election on a pledge to respect the overwhelming desire of voters to remain in the eurozone, which meant he had no choice but to go through the motions of negotiating with Greece’s creditors for as along as they were willing to indulge him. If Grexit was always his goal, then his only challenge was to ensure the talks dragged on until the bailout expired, capital controls were introduced and the country defaulted, making a euro exit hard to avoid.

If this was Mr. Tsipras’s plan, he has played it perfectly.

He has played it so perfectly, in fact, that the rest of the world is busily calling Tsipras and his advisers naïve and incompetent, not realizing that he's already won.

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"A few years ago many of the men now in charge spent their time discussing the contradictions of capitalism over coffee and cigarettes," The Economist opined in May. "Few had ever run anything, let alone a government."

Maybe this analysis gives Tsipras too much credit. As Nixon notes, it's impossible to know what the premier was really thinking, and if his goal was to keep the country in the euro, he has done a terrible job.

On the other hand, he is being advised by his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, an economist widely respected for his work on game theory.

Happy 4th of July! Wonkbook will return on Monday.

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What's in Wonkbook: 1) Greek debt 2) Long reads, including on jobs 3) the Justice Dept. is investigating price manipulation in the airline industry, and more

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Number of the day: 81. That's approximately the number of things that Mike Huckabee has denounced, according to an analysis of the former Arkansas governor's statements. The list includes "dogs wearing clothes" and "the actress Natalie Portman, for being pregnant and unmarried." David A. Fahrenthold in The Washington Post.

1. Top story: No progress on Greek debt

Greece alternates between surrender and defiance. "In a nationally-televised address, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek premier, urged his countrymen to vote No in a referendum on whether they should accept tough terms for bailout aid, and accused EU leaders of threatening to drive Greece out of the euro. ... The prime minister's hardline speech, which some eurozone officials saw as a declaration of impending Grexit, came despite an apparent major climbdown just hours earlier. In a letter sent to Greece’s creditors he accepted most of the terms of the earlier bailout. Markets across Europe rose on the news. But the letter was given short shrift by eurozone officials. They said the remaining concessions Mr Tsipras was seeking were 'not a handful of minor changes' and the letter could not form the basis of the new €29.1bn bailout programme Athens is now seeking." Peter Spiegel, Kerin Hope and Claire Jones in The Financial Times.

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Greek voters, meanwhile, have no idea what to make of Sunday's referendum. "Imagine the fate of your country hangs on a yes-or-no question. The question is drafted in cryptic, bureaucratic language and asks you to decide on an economic program that no longer exists. Leaders in neighboring countries are begging you to vote yes. Your government is begging you to vote no. Now you can understand what it feels like to live in Greece, land of debt, sunshine and, these days, profound political weirdness. The country is approaching one of the most important votes in its modern history on Sunday — one that could redefine its place in Europe — yet many people acknowledge they barely have a clue as to what, exactly, they are voting on." Jim Yardley in The New York Times.

How did all this happen? "Once the Greeks joined the euro in 2002, they could borrow at very cheap rates given they were now borrowing under the continent's implicit guarantee, and they dramatically over-borrowed. ... In the mid-1990s, even before it came into existence, markets made a huge bet that the euro would be a reality. Specifically, investors, many in northern Europe, bet that interest rates in northern and southern Europe would converge. At the time, interest rates in southern Europe were much higher than in northern Europe, simply because people thought investing in countries like Greece was much riskier than investing in countries like Germany. In anticipation of the euro zone, investors put lots of money in the cheap, high-yielding bonds of southern Europe. That helped to drive down yields and fueled borrowing and an economic boom in southern countries." Ana Swanson in The Washington Post.

IP: The euro is still very popular. "Even before the euro was launched, many American economists considered it doomed, a political project erected on a flawed economic foundation. ... With Greece headed toward a referendum that could start the unraveling of the common currency, those skeptics might be tempted to crow 'I told you so.' They should resist the temptation. The crisis has indeed laid bare the euro’s rickety economic architecture. But it has also affirmed its extraordinary political appeal. And that may yet be its salvation. For many Europeans, the euro symbolizes Europe, and as hard as life with the euro has been, life without it looks worse. In Greece and Spain, among the hardest-hit countries during the financial crisis, support for retaining the currency tops 70% in recent polls." The Wall Street Journal.

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2. Top long reads for the long weekend 

This is the only essay about Millennials you ever need to read. "Millennials do have some real potential advantages over previous generations, from our higher levels of education to all the possible benefits of digital technologies. But before we get too excited about all the low-cost goods and services our generation can summon with an app, we need to understand that even these features of the 'sharing economy' are making some people above us very rich while we become a generation that owns virtually nothing. ... Many Millennials—including me—are no longer working full-time jobs but are instead making do with the gig economy, part of the contingent job market that is comprising a bigger and bigger share of the labor force. By some estimates, contract employment made up fully half of the jobs added after the recession, and contract workers are currently 40 percent of the labor force. ... We don’t have benefits, like health insurance or employer matches for 401(k)s, and our jobs are unstable. Employers can end relationships with us at any time, and much of the work is project based. Contacts and clients can dry up, and it’s harder to forge new ones without an office to go to. Skills can atrophy. These workplace setbacks can impact the rest of our lives." Monica Potts in the Washington Monthly.

Teachers at some charter schools are unionizing. "For teachers, unions, and charter school advocates, the moment is fraught with challenges. Traditional unions are grappling with how they can both organize charter teachers and still work politically to curb charter expansion. Charter school backers and funders are trying to figure out how to hold an anti-union line, while continuing to market charters as vehicles for social justice. ... Higher teacher salaries, more transparent pay scales, and greater control over working conditions may help attract more qualified candidates to teach. Research does show that increased teacher voice helps decrease teacher turnover, and it also shows that high teacher turnover costs schools millions of dollars, disrupts student learning, and weakens institutional capacity. Many objectives that teachers hope to achieve through unionization are grounded in a desire for greater stability." Rachel Cohen in The American Prospect.

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The old economic prophecy of a world without labor is being fulfilled. "Some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. ... Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth—at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy. But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen." Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

Unit of measure of the day: The gigaton. "A gigaton is equivalent to a billion metric tons. A male African elephant might weigh, at most, 6.8 metric tons, according to the San Diego Zoo. So a gigaton is well over a hundred million African elephants. As for sea life, the blue whale can weigh as much as 146 metric tons, according to NOAA. So a gigaton is more than 6 million blue whales." Chris Mooney in The Washington Post.

3. In case you missed it

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The Justice Department is investigating price manipulation in the airline industry. "The Justice Department is investigating whether some of America’s biggest airlines have colluded to keep airfares high, striking at an industry that has posted record profits recently while limiting routes and affordable seats, officials familiar with the matter said Wednesday. ... Representatives from Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines confirmed they were among those being investigated and said they were complying with Justice Department requests. ... 'Economics 101. Reducing supply with rising demand means increased prices,' Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in an interview. 'Consumers are suffering rising fares and other added charges that seem to be the result of excessive market power concentrated in too few hands and potential misuse of that power.' " Drew Harwell, Ashley Halsey III and Thad Moore in The Washington Post.

The federal minimum wage is holding back Puerto Rico. "Puerto Rico’s long-simmering debt crisis owes much to an economy that has been shedding jobs for years. And blame for that, economists say, stems in part from how the island operates under the same wage rules as the more prosperous 50 states. The commonwealth is subject to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, even though local income and productivity are significantly lower than in Mississippi, the poorest American state. The minimum wage in Puerto Rico is equal to 77% of per capita income, compared with 28% in the U.S. overall. ... The island’s lack of competitiveness can be seen in the scant growth of its low-skill and low-wage industries, such as tourism. The number of hotel beds on the island has changed little from the 1970s, and tourist arrivals are down over the past decade." Nick Timiraos and Ana Campoy in The Wall Street Journal.

Californians are using less water. "Residential water use in California fell 28.9 percent in May, the biggest decline since the state’s governor mandated citizens cut their water consumption to weather a severe drought." Devin Henry in The Hill.

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