Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism Paperback – January 1, 2017

Great book, breaks down economies and markets in the most simplest form to gain a better understanding of the topics.

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.

Yanis’ writing is clear and convincing. He makes excellent points in his book, which are very hard to refute. Although I do not espouse his fierce anti religion sentiments, I must admit that he speaks the truth about how belief in any deity has been manipulated to serve the ruling classes in any society. He comes across as a true prophet, which I know, sounds hilarious considering his fierce opposition to religion. This is the second book of his I have read and plan to read more.

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.

A must read to understand the economy, in simple terms. I have taken economics in college, and of course, we have all heard bout the 'invisible hand' of the market, and the law of supply and demand, etc. etc., but for most of us, this does not really explain (or make sense, frankly) what is happening. Prof. Varoufakis explains the reality so we can understand the problem, and possibly, know the way to solve the problems that beset us. Ignorance is not bliss; we need real facts and knowledge, and we need to know who the enemy of financial freedom is and how we can get out from under. When we read economics as taught to most of us, we read about how if supply exceeds demand, then the pendulum swings so as to correct this, but what does that mean to real people depending on wages to live and exist in our society? We must understand that ours is a system that is set up to enrich the rich, and extract from the rest of us. Until we understand this and then get it changed we continue to be slaves to our system and those who make the rules.