Ms. Oppewall, who designed the sets for "Seabiscuit," was raised a Calvinist and accepted a certain level of austerity in life.
With it, analysts said, comes a new level of austerity as vacationers search for frugal ways to get away by juggling their finances, taking shorter trips and even staying with relatives.
Further cuts might help, but markets long ago lost confidence that there is a politically achievable level of austerity sufficient to deliver the necessary Greek surpluses.
Still, that sounds like it takes a monk-like level of austerity.
During the three-year melodrama of the eurozone crisis, they were concerned bystanders as the "troika", composed of the commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, imposed an eye-watering level of austerity in bailed-out and indebted member states such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, where youth unemployment rates have soared above 50% in some regions.
When push comes to shove, governments are unwilling to impose the required level of austerity on their voters.
The Greek government cannot pay its debts, whatever new and greater level of austerity it might impose on its people.
Thompson said: "We are doing quite a lot of work into what the future of the force might look like in the next five years and that is assuming that the level of austerity continues at the current rate [and] the force comes close to being the size it was in 1974.
When I asked Mason why it hasn't been kicking off quite so much in the UK, he told me, "You can more or less draw a line through Europe between countries that have gone into deep depression-style austerity – where you see big social movements – and everything above that where there hasn't been that catastrophic level of austerity.
It needs to be better than the present -- a present of catastrophic levels of austerity, deepening inequality and rising racism.
