How delightful to see your comment. I just finished reading the review and it’s quite a good critique and well worth the time. I actually had to print it out to read it as it’s a bit of a tome and I just couldn’t read it on screen. Why is that?
Anyways, he also has a long critique of Thomas Picketti's Capital in the 21st Century (another good read btw, though I did this book on Audible which was quite good).
I find Varoufakis to be dead-on in his critique, but would often like more focus on many possible post-capitalisms.
The failures of S????? were many, and it is easy to simply call them hopelessly naive (from one side) or abject sellouts (from the other) - and there is no doubt Greece was in a hole partially (only partially) of its own making with no good way forward. And yes, he has a bit of "I'm the most important rockstar in the room energy" but so do a bunch of VCs and founders.
The idea of moving towards market socialism with universal income and using central banking as a mechanism to reduce inequality is new-ish. There are many threads in his writings that are not about anti-capitalism, nor a return to previous types of socialisms, but of how to harness market forces to continue to generate progress while reducing their massively negative externalities.
In any case, his ideas are worth more discussion than his personality.
His main thesis here seems to be that modern capitalism, including the financial sector, is not serving the people as well as it should, or as well as it did during the middle third of the 20th century. It sounds like you agree with him, but want to criticize anyway?
> The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier. There are a lot of insights in there but beware that the writing is kinda problematic in some ways, so it doesn’t get my full endorsement.
Picketty kind of reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari in that they both have stunning insight and perspective on the past, but get quite bland once the present comes up.
For YNH, his key points in history really changed my perspective, on people history and progress. I'm totally sold on the central thesis: human progress is fundamentally the ability too cooperate in increasingly large groups, and the quality of that cooperation. The whole thing is mediated by our arsenal of collective fictions.
But when we get to the present, what we have is fairly generic. He's certainly an intelligent commenter, but the historical thesis doesn't seem to play into his current affairs opinions at all, or his futurism.
Picketty is similar (but a lot less readable). He makes a pretty compelling empirical case for his thesis, growing inequality is a long term trend during capital accumulatui periods. Wealth disparities are mitigated by big capital destruction events like big wars. There's a theoretical case but it's simple and the evidence is in the data, not the theory (r<g). Convincing.
What does this mean for the present? Apparently, something approximating the current French tax system.
Income tax isn't new. We've had higher and lower high marginal rates than suggested in this article. The problems within those system are the problems.
I get your point now, however he does a really good job in Capital in the XXIe century to be purely descriptive and mostly rigorous (and why this work was regarded so highly even from rightist, neoclassical economists). His political philosophy contribution is mainly from his interviews and Capital and Ideology which is politically loaded because logically from his political "activism" he had to respond to the first book in which he wasn't. (as an idea, demonstrating descriptively how inequality works, how capitalism favors inequalities, people were expecting now what do you propose about it ? Which is then a ecopol book). I get where you came from though.
> In his recent book "Capital in the 21st Century", he's done something very big. He's pointed out that capitalism is flawed -- that inequality is not an unintended result, but rather an inherent feature of it. He's done this with an enormous amount of data.
Am I missing something? Isn't this part of socialist analysis of capitalism from at least back to Marx?
Other Varoufakis videos that are worth watching if you want to know more about him and his views:
* "The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy " -- about his book, a nice narrative of the last 100 years of the political economy -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEUWxNifJJ8
* Richard D. Wolf's Global Capitalism update featuring Varoufakis -- Richard D. Wolf is always fun to watch, he looks like a Marxist version of Homeland's Saul Berenson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc-iYzniEXM
It's evident from watching these that he is almost without exception the smartest person in every room he's in. And unlike most other economists, he is actually, you know, alive.
Also, the obligatory Pettis articles that should be read by everyone who wishes to form an opinion about Greece's current position:
He makes some really good points about the way that the capital owning classes actually don't want greater democratic enfranchisement. He also makes some great points about how there doesn't seem to be as much inclination towards revolutionary art.
As people come to grips with the decline of American power and begin to realize that, in fact, we aren't free or special or really living up to any of the high ideals that are described in some of our founding documents and rhetoric you will see more arguments like these.
At the root of his critique is that he really does believe that we are special and this place can be magic. It isn't and it won't be.
EDIT: Libertarianism is a dying hooker licking 9V alkaline batteries for that metallic taste of excitement every time it gets to posit a counterfactual notion about some basic human tenant. It's a foolish sounding semi-sorta ideology when espoused by the middle class who are algorithmically incapable of seeing any benefit from it's implementation and a smug blanket of self-serving satisfaction for the wealthy who use it to make their social position intellectually palatable in a "dinner party" conversational sense.
While the wealthy capitalists in this article may really entertain ludicrous thoughts of building a treehouse-fort-island where they are the biggest bully, they don't do so in any way that might upset their own apple cart's on the way to markets created and policed by a political process that they go out of their way to openly despise but are intravenously connected to in ways that conjoined twins sharing a single heart would consider too close for comfort.
Libertarianism's philosopher's are the unpopular clowns at the children's birthday party of society hoping that bending their "business innovation's" into balloon animals will convince the starving attendees to actually enjoy watching them eat all of the cake. "Look it's a lion! Rawr!"
EDIT EDIT: COME ON. You know that's good. Come on!
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.
* There are a lot of parallels to Acemoglu and Robinson and their Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which puts a strong emphasis on inequality. This seems like a decent review:
* "Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties."
Weirdly contradictory, if forming groups is hard, why are there so many religions, corporations, etc? Forming groups seems to be exceedingly easy and it is perhaps human to want to be part of something larger even if its nonsensical or bad for us.
* "Of course, the power of crypto to organise surveillance-resistant communications lines protects everyone from the coercive power of states: not just nice activist groups that want a fairer society, but also whacked-out white supremacists and Islamophobic conspiracy theorists."
Kind of feels weird to take a shot at "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" when Islamic terrorist groups are the very "insurgent groups" he's talking about and probably as effective as any other group at using this tech.
Finally, just kind of disagree with the premise. If tech made the Saudis rich, if it is empowering the Zuckerbergs and the Erdogans of the world, then there's nothing inherently good about it. Technology only gets applied within a larger social context, which is why it's not the tech that matters but the civic institutions and social morality which discourages invasions of personal rights and greed which are what really matter. Robert Putnam has some really interesting stuff on this.
As a neo-classical liberal I must admit I still have to read the WoN. However, I have done a quite a lot of research to form my view of economics, which include summaries of the work of Adam Smith. I know already he was wrong about some of the things he believed in (Labor Theory Of Value) - hence the "neo". While I don't know if he actually criticized Capitalism, I find it quite irrelevant for two reasons.
- For a critique to be of any use you must propose a valid, better alternative. I have never heard of Adam Smith proposing any of that (but I might just be unaware of it).
- Even if he actually criticized Capitalism, concluding "hence Capitalism is bad" is the textbook form of the Appeal to Authority fallacy, unless you discuss his critique in a logical argument.
The only fair point of the article, in case that's true, would be that we shouldn't misrepresent his views.
He may have been wrong in the past, but this insight seems to be spot on. I'm pretty satisfied with what is to me a faithful description of the zeitgeist.
> and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative)
It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd.
By the way, he did propose two possibilities to alleviating the degradation of bullshit jobs: unionization, and universal basic income.
> Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
In the book, he argues that 50% of jobs are bullshit, not 15%.
> He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics
You may also be interested in his book Debt, an extensively cited book where he challenges the unscientific nature of modern economics. You'll find there a very rigorous critique of modern economics.
> David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory.
Perhaps the book was too steep an introduction to theories of labor and philosophy that are perpendicular to those commonly taught in public programs and held in general by a large part of society? The theories seemed quite coherent to me, but maybe that's because I had already read Marx and Kropotkin before reading Graeber. What did you think about some of these ideas from the book:
1. It's very strange that our society rewards hedge fund managers with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and teachers with 50k a year, considering by any measurement a teacher is far more valuable to society than a hedge fund manager. It seems capitalism is not good at allocating resources in a way conducive to a healthy society.
2. The general application of Marx's concept of capitalist modes of production being highly alienating for workers, but applied to modern careers like middle management for insurance companies or whatever.
3. Puritan-capitalist work ethic has turned professionalism and capitalism into a religion
4. Bullshit jobs are keeping the population too busy to protest or revolt
> And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths
Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book. None of his critiques of capitalism itself seemed all that surprising or even really new, it was mostly more arguments against the mythological invisible hand of the market and the fabled efficiency of the market so far as I read it.
I have never heard of it, but I just had a quick skim through and IMHO the bad parts are the parts that have anything to do with economics, because it exposes him as a totalitarian neofeudalist (although he might not think of himself that way ... most totalitarian neofeudalists don't, they just don't understand their own economics well enough to see where it leads).
His essay ends with a long list of recommended authors, labeled "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism", with the exhortation: "In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist."
Plenty of those authors – especially the formal economists – have written extensively on what the state does well & poorly.
As a former fund manager, I found his description of current capitalism quite close to my own. Particularly the bit where he says markets are good at a lot of stuff, but not everything.
Has anyone else had that sort of intellectual journey, where you discover libertarianism, you learn all the tropes, you feel very confident, and then after a while you pull back a bit after finding a few issues? And I suppose on the other side of the spectrum as well?
Anyways, he also has a long critique of Thomas Picketti's Capital in the 21st Century (another good read btw, though I did this book on Audible which was quite good).
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue69/Varoufakis69.pdf
Great comment.
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