The United States is experiencing an investment boom, owing to industrial policies that grant enormous subsidies – including to European firms – for investing in America, largely in green tech. Europe, meanwhile, is responding with a return to the austerity policies that caused it to fall behind the US in the first place. ATHENS – […]
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Humanity has now developed AI algorithms capable of fully decoding a killer bug’s proteins and creating an effective antibiotic. Was there ever any doubt that conglomerates like Amazon would seize upon this opportunity to shrink workplaces along their supply chain where AI predicts a higher probability of unionization? ATHENS – Last week brought a rare good-news […]
The post New AI Germ Busters Can Also Bust Unions – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
The week started ominously with a French journalist asking me whether the Greeks have turned cold-hearted, alluding to the apparent apathy to the drowning of hundreds of refugees off the coast of the Peloponnese and to the murky role played in this tragedy by our Coastguard. Yes, I replied without a second thought. A population […]
The post How the EU out-trumped Trump, plus what is killing capitalism: My last week’s Diary in The New Statesman appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Once upon a time, the greed of tobacco companies was channeled through libertarian outrage over the restriction of smokers’ freedom to choose cancer. Today, the outrage is serving the interests of bankers panicking at the prospect of central bank digital currencies. ATHENS – When First Republic Bank failed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation organized a […]
The post Who’s Afraid of Central Bank Digital Currencies? Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Only a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication can rescue the foundational liberal idea of liberty as self-ownership. Reviving the liberal individual thus requires precisely what liberals detest: a revolution. ATHENS – My father was the epitome of the liberal individual, a splendid irony for […]
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The banking system we take for granted is unfixable. The good news is that we no longer need to rely on any private, rent-seeking, socially destabilizing network of banks, at least not the way we have so far. This time the banking crisis is different. It is, in fact, worse than in 2007/8 when we […]
The post Time to Blow Up the Banking System – Project Syndicate, March 2023 appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
From the very beginning, Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon’s statues and friezes caused something of a discursive British civil war. On one side were humanists, like Lord Byron; on the other were Empire apologists, who defend Elgin’s actions and support the British Museum’s inalienable property rights to the artefacts it, eventually, purchased from him. Over […]
The post On the shameful deal Osborne-Mitsotakis are hammering out over the Parthenon antiquities – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
“Like lambs to the slaughter” was how an elderly neighbour described the deaths of youngsters travelling on Intercity 62 which, on the night of 28 February, crashed head-on with a freight train in Greece killing 57 people. Many of the dead were students returning after a long weekend from Athens to their universities in Thessaloniki. […]
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The real problem confronting European manufacturing is not the threat of factory closures. It is that, compared to the United States and China, Europe has fallen far behind in the race to accumulate, and benefit from, the cloud capital that represents the future of profit in industries like electric cars and green energy. ATHENS – […]
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A new cold war is upon us, but only China is in a position to push it beyond the point of no return. That moment will come when China’s policymakers cross the Rubicon and decide to wean Chinese economic growth off the US trade deficit. ATHENS – True hegemons prevail not by force but by […]
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