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Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister

Posted by timothy on from the finger-on-all-the-buttons dept.

eldavojohn writes A turnover in the Greek government resulted from recent snap elections placing SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) in power — just shy of an outright majority by two seats. Atheist, and youngest Prime Minister in Greek history since 1865, Alexis Tsipras has been appointed the new prime minister and begun taking immediate drastic steps against the recent austerity laws put in place by prior administrations. One such step has been to appoint Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis to position of Finance Minister of Greece. For the past three years Varoufakis has been working at Steam to analyze and improve the Steam Market but now has the opportunity to improve one of the most troubled economies in the world.

1 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This doesn't sound... sound by Gaygirlie · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know it's fashionable to jump on the Valve-hating-bandwagon, but would it be too much of an effort to, you know, not follow the flock and use some common sense instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... lists a lot of reasons for why he seems like a good person for this, like e.g. the following exerpt on his academic career:

    After training in mathematics and statistics, Varoufakis received his economics doctorate in 1987 at the University of Essex. Before that he had already begun teaching economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia. In 1988 he spent a year as a Fellow at the University of Cambridge. From 1989 until 2000 he taught as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Sydney. In 2000 he moved to his native Greece where he is still Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens (currently on leave). In 2002 Varoufakis established The University of Athens Doctoral Program in Economics (UADPhilEcon), which he directed until 2008. Since January 2013 he has been teaching at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

    This guy has written several books, he appears as guest analyst for news media like the BBC, CNN, Sky News, Russia Today and Bloomberg TV and he seems to be quite well-respected everywhere. But no, you just focus on the fact that he also happens to work for Valve.