Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Yanis Varoufakis— The Economic Case For Authentic Democracy: Ted Global-Geneva

Yesterday I delivered a TED Global talk in Geneva on the future of democracy and capitalism. While awaiting the video, here is the text of my talk.…

2 comments:

Kristjan said...

"Earlier this year, as the finance minister of a freshly elected Greek government, I was told in the Eurogroup, the governing body of the Eurozone, that my nation’s democratic process, our elections, could not be allowed to interfere with established economic policy. I can think of no more powerful vindication of Lee Kwan Yew, of the Chinese Communist Party and of cynical friends who keep telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything."

What he doesn't mention is that there are other countries in ez. Greece bailouts have already disturbed the voters in those countries, they have democracy too. Are they too stupid? Possibly yes but they don't want the Greek be running budget deficits at their expence. I had a talk with my friend recently who is a fan of MMT. He'd been in Greece on vacation. He said they are lazy, they play checkers on work time, they don't clean their gas stations and service sucks in them. He asked me that if their unemployment is so high then how so many Russians work there and foreigners. He said he doesn't care what the statistics say about working hours in Greece compared to Germany, these people are lazy.
I have to say that the Greek are different culturally than we are in North. We cannot share a common currency, It is a pipe dream.

"This is my quarrel with capitalism: its gross wastefulness in using available resources. The waste of so much idle money that should be energised to develop human talents, improve lives and, above all else, finance the development of new green technologies that can save Earth"

The idle money in private sector is not waste, It is the idle resources that are waste. But putting those resources to use would be going back to neolithic age. So here you have It.

Kristjan said...

"Which is worse, being "lazy," or being a victim of OCD?"

I honestly don't know, but I don't even care, just observing the situation. The lazy Greek is politically not correct so It is not used anymore. In the beginning of the debt crisis they were showing clips in TV how a Greek plumber had bought a Porsche Cayenne during the good times and morale was that the party was over now. :)
This is how the Greek is viewed in Northern part. Recently they didn't want to let the Frontex in on the excuse of their sovereignity and they couldn't process the incoming immigrants. So Greece is viewd as a slacker, as a cheater etc in North.