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Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister
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.
I don't know how to feel about this one...
EU trading cards to the rescue!
Finance Minister of Greece ranks pretty high on my list of "you could pay me enough, but it would be A LOT" jobs.
If he's working on "Valve's time", then he'll produce the first draft about possible solutions around 10 years after Greece has ceased to exist as a country.
He basically wants Eurozone banks to have a single rescue fund, for the ECB to issue bonds, and the EIB to invest into the periphery economies to get out of the crisis.
There's just one problem. Even if they make sense none of those things can be done by Greece alone. I hope he has a Plan B.
You can see him explain his views on the current economic crisis in this video.
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.
I'm not going to judge based on what his last job was, if he's actually technically qualified to do this one.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. Not to mention that it sort of got them there to begin with. And the people likely elected these guys because they want their benefits back, somehow. Sadly democracy does not always make for good economic policy.
It would be interesting if there was some clever model that could get them out of this mes.
What can possibly go wrong?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The fact that he is atheist has nothing to do with the story. Why mention it?
And hats, hats, as far as the eye can see!
There'd be precedent for that in the European Union. England had a law in effect from 1571 through 1597 to make failure to wear a British-made wool cap in public a crime.
borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
I don't think you understand macroeconomics. There is a too limited money supply that is significantly worsening a recession/derpession. Greece gave up one of its primary rights as a sovereign -- issuing its own currency -- and so lacks one of the most powerful policy tools for intervention in its own economy. If it wasn't part of the euro, it wouldn't have to borrow from anyone but itself. Even the US mainly borrows from itself: the majority of its debt is not held by foreigners but is simply a number registered between treasury and federal reserve, which is an accounting fiction akin to debt between husband and wife. There are primarily political reasons some of the US debt is held by others, but it's not a basic requirement of its monetary system. The typical argument against government spending is inflation, but that doesn't happen if the spending is targeted as to decrease unemployment and thus increase aggregate demand -- which is exactly what's needed in a recession. The devil is in exactly how the spending should be carried out (things like a job guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... come to mind) and should not be carried out (Bernanke's quantitative easing).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Bullshit, it sure isn't objective science, it's models, based on dubious assumptions which aren't reflective of anything other than the beliefs of the person who made them, and then using mathematics of dubious quality to "prove" what your ideology tells you.
Are you an asshole or a douchebag?
I'm saying that when people say "if you cut taxes it will stimulate the economy", that is a purely ideological position, not grounded in objective fact. And economics serves no purpose if it isn't down to implementing policy, which is inherently idological.
No, I'm saying physics still boils down to actual objective reality, and in no fucking way shape or form does economics do that, and never has.
Frankly, you're an asshole who thinks too highly of his own opinion.
So far you've failed to offer anything intelligent, just the cowardly ad hominem attacks of a worthless moron with nothing new to add.
So, I'll tell you what, here's a piece by someone who has a fucking Nobel prize in "economic science".
One problem with economics is that it is necessarily focused on policy, rather than discovery of fundamentals. Nobody really cares much about economic data except as a guide to policy: economic phenomena do not have the same intrinsic fascination for us as the internal resonances of the atom or the functioning of the vesicles and other organelles of a living cell. We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics, more practical than spiritual.
There is no Nobel prize for engineering, though there should be. True, the chemistry prize this year looks a bit like an engineering prize, because it was given to three researchers - Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel - "for the development of multiscale models of complex chemical systems" that underlie the computer programs that make nuclear magnetic resonance hardware work. But the Nobel Foundation is forced to look at much more such practical, applied material when it considers the economics prize.
The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention. The Nobel prize is designed to reward those who do not play tricks for attention, and who, in their sincere pursuit of the truth, might otherwise be slighted.
Why is it called a prize in "economic sciences", rather than just "economics"? The other prizes are not awarded in the "chemical sciences" or the "physical sciences."
Fields of endeavour that use "science" in their titles tend to be those that get masses of people emotionally involved and in which crackpots seem to have some purchase on public opinion. These fields have "science" in their names to distinguish them from their disreputable cousins.
So, seriously, fuck off and grow up.
Economics is descriptive how what complex systems involving humans do. But is is NOT measuring some innate natural properties of how that actually works.
As soon as economics goes from measuring and describing, and steps into applying policy .... it utterly ceases to be a science.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.
Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.
It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi.
One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.