The Past Speaks

That’s the title of a great blog post about Greece’s current finance minister.

By training, Varoufakis is not an economist, but a mathematical statistician. And similar to many academics who migrated from the ‘hard’ sciences to economics, Varoufakis has built a career on ridiculing economists’ inferior abilities in math and statistics. Also economists’ too simplistic belief in the miracles of the markets, their tendency only to see positive sides to technological progress, and the idea that to do economics is to build simple mathematical models, is derided by Varoufakis in witty and rhetorically gifted prose. At the same time, Varoufakis has been employed by economic faculties for some twenty-five years, in which he hence felt like an “atheist theologian ensconced in a Middle Ages monastery.”

The whole blog post is well worth reading, even if you are less fascinated by Yanis Varoufakis than I am.