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Yanis Varoufakis is Greece’s new finance minister

January 27, 2015 Leave a comment Go to comments

It was announced this morning that Yanis Varoufakis is Greece’s new finance minister.  Two of Varoufakis’s papers have appeared in the Real-World Economics Review:
Egalitarianism’s latest foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-Frist Century
What Is Neoclassical Economics?  (with Christian Arnsperger)

The Guardian reports:  

Profile: Greece’s new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis

The self-proclaimed ‘accidental economist’ is expected to adopt a constructive approach to tough debt negotiations

With a typically literary flourish, he celebrated his party’s victory by paraphrasing Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

“Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light,” the Greek-Australian wrote on his blog.

One of the first two ministers to be confirmed by prime minister Alexis Tsipras, Varoufakis studied at Essex University and has taught in Australia, Greece and the United States. In pre-election interviews he vowed to destroy Greek oligarchs, end what he called the humanitarian crisis in Greece and renegotiate the country’s debt mountain.

“We are going to destroy the basis upon which they have built for decade after decade a system, a network that viciously sucks the energy and the economic power from everybody else in society,” he told Britain’s Channel 4 television.

  1. Gerrit Zeilemaker
    January 27, 2015 at 12:36 pm
    Reply

    Very good and let we now introduce his Modest Proposal (with Stuart Holland and Jamie Galbraith) in Europe!

  2. Fedeablogs
    January 28, 2015 at 11:10 pm
    Reply
  3. davetaylor1
    January 29, 2015 at 10:56 am
    Reply

    What Is Neoclassical Economics? July 2006, p.2-12.
    (http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue38/ArnspergerVaroufakis38.htm)

    In view of the sad lack of comment on this, let me draw attention to its thesis: that the shifting neoclassical economic fairy stories remain united in diverting attention from their common axioms – methodological individualism, instrumentalism and equilibration – so one cannot tell whether or not they are well-founded. Section 3 attributes methodological instrumentalism to David Hume, whose argument actually started from methodological individualism, taking our own consciousness as the only certainty; section 2 exempts only Smith and Ricardo, Keynes and Hayek from that. It ends acknowledging the political significance of this strategy of concealment, which is clearly Machiavellian.

    What I want to emphasise is that there is a fourth cover-up: of methodological (hence global) monetarisation, which by representing value AS money directs attention to price and away from the value of maintaining human life (economics) and the disvalue of fraudulent money-making (chrematistics) in both senses, i.e. creating and acquiring it.

    This is the TINA lie which perpetuates all the others, valuing individuals by how much they are “worth”, i.e. how much (or little) money they control. The only individuals who matter in Hume’s form of democracy are the plutocracy. I can only hope Greece’s new leaders understands this well enough to be willing to expose international banking and stock market money laundering for the crimes they are, given the possibilities of “credit card” economies..

    To understand this perpetuation mathematically, look up and compare ‘quaternions’, logical quantification and the mode structure in Algol68. The latter most clearly distinguishes values, variables, modes of interpretation (dimensional structure) and none of these: the programmed procedures necessary to process and regenerate all of them.

  4. Ack Nice
    January 30, 2015 at 6:48 pm
    Reply

    Dear Mr. Varoufakis,

    i think it would be very good if you modify/clarify your vow to *destroy* the oligarchs.

    to keep faith with justice and keep the tool known as justice at the forefront of everybody’s consciousness, your vow should be to *deconstruct* the oligarchs – according to principles of justice.

    justice would be taking everything off them that was other-earned and leaving them with what was self-earned. other-earned wealth slipped away from its rightful earner-owner into the oligarch’s hands by flaws, not by rights – via myriad ‘unseen’ legal thefts in our economic systems and the fact that market forces ceaselessly and automatically shift wealth one direction and work in the other

    take everything off them if they spent no time working

    let them keep the world fairpay per hour amount (currently approx US$40) for whatever hours they did sacrifice to working – which total will never be more than twice what average working people sacrifice due to us all being subject to nature’s imposed limits.

    i know of 2 excellent ways to quickly begin to re-a-justice the wealth gently and i’d be happy to share them with you – just ask

    get majority agreement, pass 2 simple laws, and presto – the oligarchs are being deconstructed and justice is unchained, released from the dungeon she is in.

    destroying oligarchs isn’t the answer

    destroying the idea to have oligarchs is the answer

    (I call them wealthpower giants – to emphasize that money IS power)

    we nitwit humans keep faith with a cycle of self-harm; pulling down wealthpower giants and rebuilding them again – because the peoples’ idea has never yet changed from pursuit of any and all increases in wealth to the justice idea to pursue the amount we self-earn, no more and no less. people are unaware/unsuspecting that the self-earned amount satisfies all needs and very many wants and removes many high outgoing costs we all pay now for acquiescing to pay injustice, which is theft.

    injustice drives violence. every theft comes with an angry person attached. people reliably retaliate injustice. all grab for all, grab off and grab back economics destroys everybody and steals everything.

    the entire human species is looking down the loaded barrel of history on repeat on steroids kaboom. the only revolution worth having is the peaceful one that will last.

    we should stop aiming for destroying people – and instead aim to murder the diabolically stupid idea to allow personal fortunes to go on facing no limits

    problems have causes and they have solutions. the solution is removing the cause. injustice in pay is the root cause of all our preventable problems. a just cap on personal fortunes and giving the stolen wealth back to its rightful earner-owners is the necessary fix

    we have chosen unhappiness over justice forever – but our only choice now is between justice and auto-extinction of the humans

    the Equality that matters… the vital equality we need … is when an equal sign goes between the amount of work you do and the amount of pay you get. an equal sign between sacrifice to working and reward for working …an equal sign between what you put into the pool of wealth by your own work and what you take out. an equal sign between the work-value in the workproducts you put in and the work-value in the workproducts you take out.

    only education can do what has to be done to win majority support for switching to fairpay justice economics – for ditching the obsolete, unworkable, unnecessary, miseries-making overpayunderpay paradigm once and for all

    language is important. having our priorities correct is crucial. definitions need to be clarified and accurate.

    the educational campaign for fairpay justice is key to our survival, safety, liberty, prosperity, peace, happiness

    be very well and keep very well, Mr. Varoufakis – I’m out here campaigning for fairpay justice and certainly wish you all success in deconstructing the oligarchs’ overfortunes

    from an Egalitarian friend who wishes you, Syriza, Greece, and Humanity all best wishes

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