Find Μιλώντας στην κόρη μου για την οικονομία Compiled By Yanis Varoufakis File

read with R NairThe worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservienceI've been meaning to read a book explaining how Capitalism works for a very long time and I'm glad to say that this concise yet inclusive work of non fiction delivers splendidly Written in very simple language this book explains The necessity of surplus for states to existThe emergence of profit as an end of itselfThe commodification of everything and the triumph of exchange value over experential valueHow the rich have accummulated and keep accummulating wealth and why there is so much ineualityHow banks work and profit including debts interest rates inflation and deflationWhy financial crashes happen and how public debt is not always a bad thingThe faulty arguments of Unemployment Deniers those who maintain that being unemployed is a personal failure stemming from the refusal to accept low wages not a failure of our economic systemThe effect of our expectations on the course of the economyHow machines and automation fit into our worldThe impossibility of de politicizing moneyWhy the destruction of the environment is a direct result of exchange value ruling supreme and the call of the rich and powerful to privatize the entire planet already happening The reason the rich and powerful along with their intellectual and ideological supporters recommend the complete privatization of our environment is not that they are opposed to government theyre just opposed to government interventions that undermine their property rights and threaten to democratize processes that they now control And if in the process they get to own Planet Earth thats OK by them tooThe author has also used great works like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Faustus not Faust by Marlowe Thoreau's allergory of the stag hunters and The Matrix movie to illustrate how our fears and attitudes towards the turn our lives and the economy have taken bleed into and influence art These stories were especially illuminating and shall remain unforgettable Even though reading Varoufakis's book has filled me with unmitigated despair at the world's current state of affairs the mere act of educating ourselves offers a glimmer of hope for the future By not blindly trusting the economists who are not real scientists by the way we take matters into our own hands and we are indeed capable of changing the course of history if we unite and remember what really matters and that is not money in itselfWe have a very powerful enemy the rich minority who has accummulated inconceivable private wealth built and then maintained on the back of state sponsored violence not as a result of their honest efforts as they would like us to believe State sponsored violence isnt the only thing governments have provided for the powerful since then Whenever the state has used its revenues to pay for roads tunnels and bridges over which goods can be transported to maintain the hospitals and schools that deliver workers health and education to support the downtrodden and unemployed to police the towns and cities or to organize in any way the peaceful and stable functioning of society whenever it has done any of these things and many besides the state has provided the conditions in which individuals especially the most powerful ones have been able to pursue their path to wealth Seen from this angle the state has always provided the rich with a magnificent insurance policy And the rich have returned the favour by doing all they can to avoid paying their premiums However by participating in political life and by extension in the economy we have the chance to choose to demoratize everything instead of commodify everything including the forests the rivers the atmosphere Turning a blind eye will not make the problem vanish into thin air we don't have superpowers like the greedy bankers Amidst overwhelming propaganda misinformation and sheer stupidity taking action is not a luxury it's a must Unless we want to confirm Agent Smith's description of us as stupid viruses You see every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural euilibrium with their surrounding environment but you humans do notThere is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern Do you know what it is A virus Human beings are a disease a cancer of this planetHonestly you will learn so many things that may seem awfully obvious in hindsight yet most of us fail to make the connections This should be compulsory reading for every person directly touched by the economy namely everyone An eye opening concise and powerful read This is a lovely book and Ive asked both of my daughters to read it and have already started talking to one of them about it It is nice for a couple of reasons The first is that it explains complicated ideas in highly accessible ways As he says at the start you probably shouldnt trust anyone who cant explain even difficult concepts in a way that a reasonably educated person can understand This is doubly true of economics particularly since our world is run according to the dictates of economists you know if you are going to ruin my life with your austerity policies then you should have the decency to explain to me why I should do without health care and an education system for my kids And than the vague platitudes Dire Straits parodied Were gonna have to pay whats owed were gonna have to reap from some seed thats been sowedThe book uses science fiction and Greek myths to provide metaphors to help explain economic concepts It also references some of my favourite books like Guns Germs and Steel to provide a kind of why us and not them background to economic development He also references some ideas from behavioural economics not least the idea that moving from transactions of social solidarity to those of financial exchange often undermine what is best and most human about our interactions The example he gives is of people giving blood something dear to my heart as Ive been doing this for years In Australia you dont get paid for the blood you donate I do it because I think it is a nice way to give back to society without getting to choose who you are going to help Too much charity is about us giving to people like us or people so distant as to be abstract concepts than fellow humans I like the idea that Ive no idea who my blood will end up in that it could potentially be someone like my current prime minister who I would struggle to pour water on if he was on fireIn other countries they pay people to give blood You might think that the countries where they pay you would end up with blood That they would have the people like me still doing it but also other people poor people perhaps who need the money So A plus B ought to be than just A alone This isnt how it works out As he says making it a financial transaction puts people off donating because the idea of selling your blood seems distasteful In this case we have moved from altruism to a financial transaction and the value of the transaction isnt enough and perhaps never could be enough to make it seem worthwhile whereas when it was being done for free it became something uite differentThe same thing happened years ago when a city council I used to work at contracted out a service that they once provided as a community service meals on wheels for the elderly The organization that won the contract thought that they would be able to continue to use the volunteers that had always helped out But even though the contract winner would still be delivering meals to the very same old people the volunteers were not at all happy to be asked to donate their labour so that an organization would be able to profit from it And the organization was planning to profit from the contract The commodification of transactions isnt really compatible with social solidarityThe discussion in the book of the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism is also instructive and interesting He links this to the enclosing of land and therefore the removal

of peasants who had to then go to towns searching for work As such they had to sell their labour for the first time making their labour a commodity something that is a precondition of capitalist production The author is particularly good at explaining the difference between work that is done to sustain social interactions and work that is done in exchange for wages and how the previous in patriarchal societies wasnt always fair eitherHe explains the problems associated with replacing human labour with machines and how this undermines economic development since it allows those who own the machines to horde so much of societys wealthI think his explanation of how and why markets are likely to fail is useful since it is so clear and so clearly and pointedly directed at arguments against the tragedy of the commons This is a fast read and one that never gets beyond the common reader who is paying attention It explains difficult concepts like how banks can create money out of thin air how they have incentives to do this little magic trick a little too often and how that ultimately means governments will need to step in as the whole thing comes crashing down It explains how inflation and interest rates work and are interrelated Like I said there are a lot of otherwise complex ideas explained here in ways that are both easy to follow and in fact really engaging And that is as it should be Yanis Varoufakis the cheeky former Greek minister of finance and a saavy economics professor delivers an explanatory book on modern capitalism for the non academic using a variety of examples from European history Greek mythology and pop culture to make his points Varoufakis believes that understanding economics is key to a truly well functioning democracy Yet the jargon filled academic field of economics obscures important ideas in strange language and uses inane examples that make it difficult for non economists to understand This willful opacity then makes it easier for the people who do speak the lingo to pull a fast one on the rest of us His goal with this book is to demystify a number of the important economic topics of the time What's particularly interesting about Talking to My Daughter is the longer historical rangelens that Varoufakis uses to explain economic phenomenon and its grounding in European Greek perspective Whether he's using the myth of Oedipus Rex to illuminate how the power of prophecy can markets to self sabotage or the story of Faustus selling his soul to Mephistopheles to explain the rise in contract based debt it is entertaining Rarely will you find a discussion of economic phenomenon using a blend of stories from feudal Europe and Greek mythology from an American scholar in fact rarely do American universities teach the historical basis of economics at all except for Smith's invisible handOverall Talking to My Daughter About the Economy is a provocative alternative look at of many of the current weaknesses and threats posed by the global economic system that helps put it in global historical context Read my longer review of the book here In Talking to My Daughter About the Economy activist Yanis Varoufakis Greeces former finance minister and the author of the international bestseller Adults in the Room pens a series of letters to his young daughter educating her about the business politics and corruption of world economics Yanis Varoufakis has appeared before heads of nations assemblies of experts and countless students around the world Now he faces his most importantand difficultaudience yet Using clear language and vivid examples Varoufakis offers a series of letters to his young daughter about the economy how it operates where it came from how it benefits some while impoverishing others Taking bankers and politicians to task he explains the historical origins of ineuality among and within nations uestions the pervasive notion that everything has its price and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk Finally he discusses the inability of market driven policies to address the rapidly declining health of the planet his daughters generation stands to inherit Throughout Varoufakis wears his expertise lightly He writes as a parent whose aim is to instruct his daughter on the fundamental uestions of our ageand through that knowledge to euip her against the failures and obfuscations of our current system and point the way toward a democratic alternative Yanis Varoufakis economics professor and former finance minister of Greece subscribes to a simple view that I share if you cant teach your subject to kids youre not such a good teacher OK string theorists might get a let off on that one but only maybe Now for those of us who teach history sociology cultural studies and the like it might seem that were getting off easily in comparison to Varoufakis who teaches economics Towards the end of the engaging and highly accessible history of capitalism he turns his focus on those who see economics as a science whose complex economic models obscure and obfuscate the everyday experience of those of who live with their edicts and the window dressing of politicians who implement their plans and advice and he is in no way forgiving of those who make histheir area of expertise one of untrammelled confusionVaroufakis teaches by story telling and cutting through the density of much that passes for economic theory to find everyday events situation and scenarios that can help explain the points he making about money markets power work labour and global or rather glocal ecosystems In keeping with Syriza the party for whom he became finance minister his history is largely a Marxist one constrained by the historiographical insights of Karl Polyani while his economics is for the most part Keynsian but what we might see as small state Keynsian in that he sees a world that is predominantly democratic where decision making rests on cooperative community approaches with a democratic state although he doesnt suggest the relationship between these two levels and thats not the point of the book In that sense he is working in a framework provided by fairly orthodox heterodox economics if thats not an oxymoronAs orthodoxically heterodox Varoufakis is in good company and although there is uite a lot about that outlines economic approaches that reject the dominant neo liberal leave it to the market style there is little I have seen that is this accessible and this engaging he seems to have read his intended audience well Of course that means there are many who will find fault for not being sufficiently Marxist or Keynsian or whatever the preferred style is for being over reliant on game theory or underplaying the environmental aspects of capitalisms development and order or countless other problems Then there are those who will find fault with his oversimplification of economics or his politicisation of the market One of the many things I have learned as a teacher alongside the need for humility is that there are many ways to tell the same story or make the same point and our readersstudentspupils need to hear several different forms to get it we hear and read differently and diversity in writersteachers voices is essential To my mind Varoufakis has achieved something of us should aim for demystifying a set of social relations often than not presented in complex ways that limit our ability to be involved in debates about and the politics of those relations When that limitation is imposed on something as essential as the economy it is profoundly undemocratic and dangerous If this invigorating economics text demystifies those relations and enhances our economic literacy which I am convinced it must Varoufakis has done us all a favourIf youre concerned that there is an economic discussion going on around you and want to get to understand the underpinning system set aside the frankly magical and mystifying language of economic management and go for politics and systems analysis This is good place to start but beware it will encourage you to find demanding texts and so it should I would have liked a suggestion for further reading but Naomi Kleins No is Not Enough is a good start.