How can Sri Lanka recover? This newspaper ran an article from the German press looking at this and the answer was, well, it was somewhat German.
It was all about what the government should do, how to recreate that order that Germans so famously desire and demand.
There is another answer available, stemming rather more from the Anglo Saxon tradition rather than the German.
There's a slight amusement possible here as this is normally called “Austrian” economics but that's a recent naming of the base idea.
The argument is that, instead of actually trying to plan things, just get the very basic structures of law and incentives right then allow things to happen.
There are parts of the economy where absolutely everyone agrees that this is the right way to manage things.
Which type of bread any individual eats is rightly seen as something for that individual to decide.
Which types are made is left to demand for them -- no central planner (well, not since the Soviets) tries to determine what bakers should make.
The Austrian -- or, historically, the Anglo Saxon -- idea of the economy is that this applies not to certain little corners of the economy, but near all of it.
Set the basic rules like peace, easy taxes, and the tolerable administration of justice (as Adam Smith put it) and leave it be to see what happens.
Yes, there are other little corners of said economy where the government really does have to do something.
Areas where not only must something be done but only the government can do it.
But the government should limit itself to those things and the rest of life is something that we the people will deal with.
So, according to this tradition, what Sri Lanka should do is strip away much of what the government has recently been trying to do.
So, this means just stop trying to control the exchange rate -- it's not possible to have a shortage of foreign currency if the price is flexible.
Stop insisting upon organic agriculture. Stop trying to tax remittance earnings -- if the money comes in then that’ll get spent in the domestic economy anyway and it can be taxed there.
Essentially, just leave things be and watch what happens.
There are problems that the government must deal with, like foreign debt.
But a useful observation is that debts which cannot be paid will not be paid.
Doesn't matter how much anyone shouts about it, if there's no money then creditors just aren't going to get any.
This means that going to all the meetings and doing nothing very much actually works -- it'll be years before anything else happens.
It’s also true that, as long as those meetings are attended, then the IMF will make sure there's enough money to pay for the really basic things that the government must do.
In some ways this can be seen as an opportunity to strip away the unproductive, even retrograde, activities of the Sri Lankan government.
One worry could be that we all know that economic growth is hard.
It takes time and usually doesn't exceed 6% or 7% a year, and is often much slower than that. Perhaps we’d like Sri Lanka to climb up out of the depths rather faster than that.
There’s good news here though.
Rebuilding is much easier, faster, than repairing the original building.
The truly massive economic growth rates that we’ve seen around the world over time come from episodes where there’s been a collapse in the economy followed by a restart.
This is because working out how to grow the first time around involves an awful lot of thinking, a lot of trial and error.
So, what is it that we should do in order to become richer?
But when there's been an economic disaster that’s different. For, clearly, we already knew how to be richer because we were.
So all we’ve got to do is go back to what we were doing and we’ll be richer than we are now.
We can also describe this as people in general understanding and grasping what is needed to be richer -- leave them be and they’ll go and do that.
We even cite an example here: In 1945, Germany was bombed so flat the bricks were bouncing from the air raids happening.
Yet, a decade later, by 1955 at the latest, Germany was growing faster than anywhere else in Europe.
For Germans knew, whether we say this culturally or individually, how business works, how to add value, how, in essence, to grow an economy.
After all, they'd been doing pretty well in 1933, memories do span that long.
It's much easier to get a place back to being as rich as it once was than it is to advance it to being richer again.
The joy of this economic recovery is that Ludwig Erhard, the German economist behind the policies that led to it, entirely rejected that Germanic insistence upon order and planning and insisted upon more Austrian, or Anglo Saxon, policies.
An entire absence of planning and price fixing in fact.
Sri Lanka’s a bust.
The answer to which is less government and more economic freedom.
But then that's so often the correct answer anyway, isn't it?
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London
