Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works--and How It Fails Paperback – May 21, 2019

I have Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, to thank for keeping me up all night reading page and page, to the early hours of the morning, unable to put this book down. Yanis Varoufakis is that rarest of writers who can make the subject of economics interesting. To say this book is a page-turner is an understatement, not because it is a thrilling read with action, but because it is just a beautifully written piece of literature. It is a contemplative work. In this book he attempts to answer the question, “How did we get into this mess?” In answering his question he is thinking through the answer on paper and the result is this book. His tone is pensive, his voice is muted, and his ideas are presented carefully and methodically. That question has been asked before, so his subtitle is “A Brief History of Capitalism,” which is functionally the same. He could have simply answered his question with, “The System,” but that would have been too easy and not enough. So what Varoufakis does is choose significant events in human development, compare those events with responses from other societies, all of which lead to the present economic system. He knows the answer to his question in advance of course — he is after all a leading economic theoretician — so he uses a literary device of answering that question in the first person to his fourteen-year old daughter. Brilliant! His real daughter may not be the intended audience of Varoufakis’ book and may or may not be genuinely interested in Varoufakis’ explanation of how we got here, but we are, because we are Varoufakis’ fourteen-year old daughter.I like to think of this book as “Marx Light” or “Marx 101.” The fact that the cover of this book is in a bright red cover is a tip-off right there. Not that there is anything disparaging about this remark. Better than any other economist, before or since, Marx understood the strengths and weaknesses of Capitalism and his works are read by the movers and shakers in Wall Street (along with Milton Friedman). Varoufakis wisely avoids names and labels in this work. The result is a thorough work which one would be hard-pressed to argue. You could still disagree with his methods or conclusions, but Varoufakis is a good writer and you will still be amazed at literary quality of this work.

In this captivating account of economics for the unlettered, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis eschews the apparatus of scholarship and explains the subject thru the conceit of a letter to his young daughter living in Australia (that part is not fiction). This provides him a convenient entry into the evolution of markets by tackling the question "Why didn't the Aborigines conquer England?"As he tells the story, he begins to introduce the topics and ideas of economics - exchange value, labor, production, money, interest, et al.The great virtue of this book, aside from its clarity and wit, is Varoufakis' lesson that economics is not, and can never be, a science after the fashion of physics or chemistry - for one thing, it deals in that most subjective of things - value. The author helps us see that sometimes economics tells stories that not only purport to explain the way things are, but to justify them as well ( Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide does this as well). Toward the end of the book he explains that economics came to substitute as legitimating narratives of the ruling class after religious narratives began to lose currency.Varoufakis presents us a choice: let economic and value decisions be made by the relatively few and wealthy who control the means of production, or by all citizens of a democratically-constituted government.

It's good to get confirmation of many beliefs you may already have about markets and capitalism. Well thought out with great metaphors. But his philosophy on what we really want falls short, you can leave me anytime in the Matrix vs a hole in the ground.

I indeed thought Varoufakis was making an attempt at what "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder did for Philosophy, but for Economics. How much much more this is! From the Economy to Politics and the value of a life worth living, with important chapters in Artificial Intelligence and the Environment, Varoufakis produces here what may be the clearer call for Democracy in the 21st Century. As the book illustrates with real world examples and ancient greek tales alike, the Economy and the social contracts we have been unable to shape, are the landscape where we are curraled, and where we break free from new forms of ideology trying to justify the unsustainable dehumanization of society. An absolute must read for all that treasure the Liberty of the human spirit. And it turns out I have just the right daughter to pass this book onto ... :-)

Despite repeated attempts at self-education, I have remained a financial illiterate my whole adult life. Read any standard economics text and it will discuss supply curves and demand curves as if they were (usually linear) mathematical functions. Fine. Linear functions are easy to understand. The problem is that even these simple ideas don't give a true explanation of the economic world we lived in. Between May 19 and May 20, the demand for automotive fuels didn't really change, but the price will reliably take a jump. The slick, nearly mathematical texts just don't line up to reality---and you can take examples from almost anywhere. This is a clear book that gives a coherent introduction to the qualitative aspects of economics, something that any person could understand---even a financial illiterate. Is everything he says correct? I don't know. That's why I'm illiterate. Certainly it is not complete, but the ideas are coherent and give a reasonable foundation from which to begin to form a better understanding. This guy isn't the pompous idiot that most economists seem to be.

To give it to my sons when they are Xenia’s age. It was a beautiful and enlightening journey not only about economics but philosophy and some history