In 2002 I visited Argentina during its freefall. The country had just devalued and defaulted, and the latest president, instead of merely resigning, had fled in a helicopter. Yet Buenos Aires – like Athens today – still looked like a middle-class city. People lived in apartment blocks with doormen and drove to restaurants in imported cars. At dinner one night, a photographer told me that just that day he had realised he’d dropped into the third world. When had it dawned? “When Amazon refused my credit card,” he said.

There are two basic ways to live: in the first world, or in the third. If the Greeks devalue and default, they might discover what it’s like when the trapdoor opens and you plunge from one world into the other. When you fall, your life changes in ways small and big, and so does your worldview.

Michela Wrong captured the divide between first and third worlds perfectly in her Graham-Greenesque book about the Congo, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. Stepping off the boat into the insanity of Kinshasa, she experiences “that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known – that there are places in this world where the safety net … is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passport – all the trappings that spell ‘It Can’t Happen to Me’ – no longer apply.”