TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

Bodley Head, 224pp, £14.99, Oldie price £10.48 inc p&p

Yanis Varoufakis is a very busy man, he’s hardly been out of the international news since the beginning of the Greek debt crisis in 2008. Even so, to write a book in just nine days, let alone a brief history of capitalism, is an achievement. Varoufakis structures the book as if in conversation with his thirteen-yearold daughter Xenia. As Anna Minton put it in the Guardian, he uses a ‘language that everyone can understand, in place of the jargoninfested pseudo-scientific language of mainstream economics’.

At the Financial Times, Laura Garmeson enjoyed Varoufakis’s wide-ranging allusions: ‘His history unspools with characteristic fluency and verve, covering thousands of years of civilisation shot through with literary references. Doctor Faustus is used to explain debt relief, market forces find echoes in the Greek myths — even The Matrix becomes a Marxist metaphor.’

David Aaronovitch, however, over at the Times, didn’t buy the thesis, objecting particularly to Varoufakis’s tendency to idealise primitive societies as edenic utopias and his ‘strange reliance on mass conspiracism’. ‘He writes of “the mass media, whose purpose is to fabricate mass consent to the oligarchy’s political decisions against our own interests and those of the planet”. Yep, that’s definitely what I came into journalism to do. As did the makers of The Matrix, also being part of the mass media.’ As for Australian aboriginals, life in the outback was not wholly paradisal: ‘One widespread custom was for men to hunt their new wives, often beating them up when they had caught them. Market societies, on the other hand, have decommodified marriage. That’s what romanticism is about.’