Yanis varoufakis blogtalkradio

This is an updated analysis of a keynote I delivered a few years ago at the Oxford Union — see […]. A keynote summing up my view that, sincethe world has wasted enormous resources in a bid to re-float finance and at the expense of our capacity to look after each other, and the planet, at a time humanity is facing existential threats — from climate catastrophe to war and toxic politics.

My discussants […]. Inin the midst of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, he became finance minister under Alexis Tsipras until he resigned after the referendum. In the meantime, he has […]. How can a Marxist-feminist, a libertarian ex-banker and a maverick technologist help us navigate our new future? Economist Yanis Varoufakis explains all.

Global crises cause big changes and reveal deep structural weaknesses. In this special interview series from the RSA its chief executive, Matthew Taylor, puts a range of practitioners on the spot — from scholars to […]. Coronavirus: The economic crisis — Just how bad will the downturn be and can anything be done to soften the blow? The rest is utterly insignificant.

Yanis varoufakis blogtalkradio: I interviewed Yanis Varoufakis about

It's perhaps less significant than the London Stock Exchange is today. So clearly, the market values the power that stems from owning cloud capital far, far more than it does the power that stems from traditional forms of, say, terrestrial capital to juxtapose it against cloud capital. And the third point is that this is not about technology. It's a mistake.

Technology is everywhere. I mentioned Volkswagen before. If you go to a Volkswagen factory, it's very advanced technologically. The industrial robots that they use are the latest technology and they are very impressive. And yet it's bankrupt. And it's bankrupt because they have industrial robots that are not connected to cloud capital.

Yanis varoufakis blogtalkradio: The first glimpse of our

You see, what I try to do in this book is not to think of it as machines or as forms of technology. They are all that. But to understand the historical moment in which we find ourselves, you have to understand what I called before a mutation of capital: You see, these singing and dancing industrial robots, the amazing technology that goes into aerospace, Boeing jets and Lockheed fighter jets and so on—this is all, from a technological point of view, quite astonishing.

But it is no different, in a sense, to the fishing rod that I mentioned before. They are all capital goods in the sense that they are produced means of production, things we produced in order to produce something else. But cloud capital is not a produced means of production.

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It is something radically different than that—it's a produced means of behavioral modification. Now, behavioral modification has always been around. This is not new: Every preacher, every author, every politician, every philosopher tries to modify our behavior. Every psychologist, every advertiser, for that matter, especially since the Second World War.

What is new is that this has become automated. It has been given as a task to a machine. And not only that, but it is the most dialectical of machines in the sense that it is a machine that interfaces with you in real time, day and night. So you would take Amazon's Alexa or Siri, your iPhone Siri or the Google Assistant or any of these devices—essentially, you're training them.

You're training Alexa to know you. You're training it to train you to train it better; to give you good advice, capture your trust, not so much your attention, but your trust with good advice that it gives you. And it does give you good advice, whether it is Spotify recommending music, or Alexa recommending books, or what to do on your night out. It gives you good advice and gains your trust.

Once it has implanted into your mind a preference for a particular product or service, it actually sells it to you directly, bypassing markets. Now, if you conceptualize cloud capital like that, you realize that this, folks, this is no longer capitalism. Welcome to technofeudalism. Mounk : I want to change topics a little bit and talk about the state of Europe and the European Union today.

One of the links between the two topics is that the United States 20 years ago had a similar GDP per capita to many European countries and now, in part because of the tremendous growth of productivity in the tech sector, it is much richer than Europe is. Some of that is top heavy, some of that is because of the increase in wages for computer programmers or the increase in wealth of the owners of some of these companies.

But a lot of it actually is that nowadays people doing similar jobs in the United States end up making a lot more money than those in Europe. So whereas America's share of global GDP has stayed roughly constant for the last 25 years, Europe's has rapidly decreased, and many countries in Europe haven't really had significant increases in their standard of living in yanis varoufakis blogtalkradio or so years.

And now, of course, we see a new economic crisis brewing even in countries like Germany, which were supposed to be the economic powerhouses of the European Union but are now starting to look in many ways more like the sick man of Europe. Before we get into particulars about the European Union, or perhaps touch on the debt crisis and the fallout of a great recession, how would you assess the state of the European continent?

Why is it that Europe has proven to be so much less inventive than many other countries in the last years? Why has it had so much less economic growth? Why does its economic relevance in the world seem to dwindle so much faster than that of other countries? And are you worried about those things? Varoufakis : I'm not just worried. I'm devastated by the state of Europe.

Europe has entered not a recession, but a long-term structural slump from which I think it has more or less a zero probability of exiting anytime in the next 50 years. This is why I feel devastated. But let me explain why, though I feel everything you said is correct, I have a different explanation of why this happened. It's not that Europe suddenly decided yanis varoufakis blogtalkradio to be technologically advanced or not to invest in high-tech.

Europe, after the Second World War, with the help of the United States actually surpassed the United States in terms of technological innovation. And this is why German factories were so far more competitive than American ones by the s. Everything boils down to a common currency. If we had not created this common currency and instead we had done something quite different, then Europe would not be in the utterly debilitating and psychologically crushing situation in which we find ourselves.

Allow me to explain that. We created the European Union as a cartel of big business. We were not even a confederacy. We created in Brussels a management board, the purpose of which was to restrict output for coal, later electrical goods, and bankers were incorporated in that, large-scale farmers with a common agricultural policy. Now, a cartel like OPEC requires a common currency.

Imagine now the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Venezuela and Indonesia and so on try to coordinate their efforts to boost their profits from oil or rents from oil without having oil being equally denominated in dollars. It wouldn't have happened. So in the first two decades—. Mounk : Explain why that is.

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But he also believes there is a democratic socialist alternative, which he presents in his novel Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. Varoufakis asks […]. My first inkling that his music was significant was when my parents warned me — I must have been 6 or 7 yrs old — that merely whistling a Theodorakis tune was an arrestable offence — such was the fear that his music caused in the minds of our fascist rulers during the awful dictatorship […].

In Payback, Atwood examines money lending throughout the ages and how it has been portrayed in classic literature. Meanwhile, […]. Greece says there's a case for a Covid vaccine passport which would allow people to travel freely within the EU. Our guest today on Change Makers is former finance minister of Greece, economist and author, Yanis Varoufakis.

We talked about, of course, Israel-Palestine, but also about China and, in particular, the New Cold War being waged for control of what I call cloud capital. Thanks Cambridge Union! A diverse group of global thinkers answers 8 fundamental questions about economics and capitalism. In this video interview, Yanis Varoufakis has a go: — Prologue — Intro — 1.

Why does economics matter? What are the differences between economic science and economic engineering? What role does […].