'Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism’ by Yanis Varoufakis - Review

Varoufakis tells us in the prologue that he wrote this book in 9 days without a plan or provisional table of contents, and loved it. He explains that he let the book write itself at his home in Aegina - thus, it effortlessly and enjoyably reads itself too.

Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, as the title suggests, is a fond-toned explanation of the inner workings of a market society from the past, through the present, to the future. It is simplified without being patronising or boring and lives up to its title as a reader feels guided, rather than lectured, about the economy. He explains tans clarifies whilst allowing the economy and economic situations to explain themselves through their multiple links. He describes a market society as a series of interwoven events and reactions that give an ‘ohhhhh’ reaction to every paragraph.

He explains the economy chronologically, using the passing of time and the passing of different markets and market structures as a vehicle to explain the living, reactive organism that is a market society; what fuels it, what powers it, and how it reacts to varying scenarios.

From the very basics of economy, combining history with simplified metaphor, he explains the inextricable link between economy, society, and the state. Surplus, for example, exists for people that don’t or can’t work, and where there is surplus there is a commodity, requiring a trust of production in purchase, and where there is trust there is debt, and where there is debt, there must be a higher power to monitor and police these debts.

The book journeys from hunting to trading commodities, to surplus creating a ‘market’, to the creation of currency through to feudalism and the industrial revolution. Varoufakis uses the beginnings of a market society to explain how it is and why it is. By taking it back to its routes, he layers various concepts on one another as they were created instead of trying to work backwards from a complex entanglement of concepts, terms, and relationships. By working from the ground up a reader can see how and why certain systems, existences, and economic truths are in place and were created..

He untangles the knots of economic relationships by imagining them as untied, singular concepts, and by tying them together in front of us, explaining which thread goes where like teaching someone how to braid. For example, he talks a reader through how goods became commodities, and then how surplus became profit. He explains how eventually the process of production into distribution into debt was reversed with debt and credit being moved to the beginning, then distribution, then actual production; how we recognise the economy as functioning today.

He tells a reader of the origins of concepts, terms, and existences in the markets and economy that are viewed as constants and natural and therefore are almost unexplainable and unquestionable. He even explains, for example. how complex markets were created in European countries that would eventually give  them military advantages and lead to historical facts like colonialism. In short, Europe is horizontal sharing a similar climate across borders making transportation easier than in Africa, for example, where the climate changes drastically spanning the continent make transportation, trade, and markets more difficult. The labour market too, for example, is explained as a result of serfs being removed from their land due to the feudal system and desperate for any amount of work or money at the same time that factories required many low-paid workers.

Using the industrial revolution and the labour market and the rise in automatization he explains the current labour market and speculates on its future. He uses fiction and sci-fi anecdotes to speculate on the future of humanity that is tied up with the future of the labour market. He attempts to answer the unanswerable and growing anxieties about an AI taking over and looking at this from a completely economic perspective. Yes, complete automation of production processes is becoming and may one day be the most ‘productive’ and cost-efficient – but without any labour, there are no wages, and without wages, there are no markets to consume commodities produced, no matter how efficiently and cheaply they are made.. Perhaps we will not be taken over by machines simply due to profit incentives of those with the power to facilitate it.

He also uses the profit perspective in consideration of the environment. Would privatisation and commodification of the environment lead to better care being taken of it because businesses are monetarily involved? As he says himself, economists are not scientists, they are philosophers, and he doesn’t attempt to answer any proposed scenario without a counterargument or anything more definitive of educated, speculative links of cause and effect.

Using myths, plays, popular films, books, personal anecdotes, and history, he creates an explanation of the economy that is as entertaining as it is enlightening. He less reduces, more clarifies, the economy into a series of interactions that can be analogised and viewed as things that are smaller, and more manageable than the colossal associations of the word ‘economy’ . What is the economy, society, and the world, if it is not a collection of concepts that can be boiled down to modest metaphors, culturally contextual tales, anecdotes, and moral fables?