Adults in the Room

Three years ago, today, the people of Greece staged a rebellion against their debt bondage. Though this rebellion was overthrown from within almost immediately, it remains a remarkable testimony to the power of a people to say No to the oligarchy, to wrestle control of the narrative of their circumstances from the inanely authoritarian elites, and to overcome the fear which a tiny minority uses to take the demos out of democracy.

Yanis Varoufakis discusses his books, Adults in the Room and Talking to my Daughter About the Economy, at Politics and Prose on 10th May 2018

Yanis Varoufakis – Happiness, Inc. – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #149

Jason GOTS: As the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me… Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. But under global capitalism, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to it. As an American child of the 1980s, I absorbed the message “find yourself!” “Follow your passions!” But there are powerful economic forces at work, shaping our lives and opportunities.

The idea of a unified Europe didn’t always elicit the current mixture of exasperation, boredom, and rage, in politicians and ordinary people alike. In fact, there was a time when the European Union seemed like a great initiative, especially on a continent ravaged first by two hot wars, then broken in half by a cold one. A permanent peace between neighboring nations founded on a common market and sealed with freedom of movement for all might have required bureaucratic impositions, but it also functioned as an insurance policy.

Polémico. Atractivo. Brillante. Controvertido. Los seis meses de Yanis Varoufakis(Atenas, 1961) al frente del Ministerio de Finanzas de Grecia lo convirtieron en una celebridad global, en una suerte de estrella del rock de la política económica. Sus detractores lo caricaturizan como un extremista medio chiflado de izquierdas —según su propia definición—, enamorado de las motos potentes, de los restaurantes chic, de las chaquetas de cuero y del glamour de las islas griegas.

Full script of my lecture at the Rose Theatre on Shakespeare: Since brevity is, indeed, the soul of wit, let me begin by stating the obvious: I am as qualified to deliver an annual Shakespeare lecture in this splendid theatre as an ant that walks in wonder on an iPhone is able to explain the mystery that goes on under its feet. When Professor Richard Wilson approached me out of the blue, during some political event in London, with the bewildering proposal that I appear before you tonight to talk about Shakespeare I was simultaneously flattered and incredulous.

Mark Lawson, in today’s Guardian, previews my Annual Shakespeare Rose Lecture, ahead of tonight’s delivery. He begins with its title ‘Shake the Superflux’ and the statement: ‘The beauty of King Lear is that it encourages us to think about inequality’.

Yanis Varoufakis has emerged not only as an embattled finance minister, iconoclastic economist, and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), but a life-long lover of Shakespeare. He called the Greek debt crisis ‘a Shakespearean tragedy’, reported that observing the European Union is ‘like watching Othello’, and compared the world’s Deep Establishment to Shylock and Macbeth. Those who sold out were ‘like Richard III’, or Lady Macbeth saying ‘What’s done cannot be undone’.