95: Yanis Varoufakis

May 24, 2018

How should parents talk to their children about the economy: how it operates, where it came from, how it benefits some while impoverishing others? Former Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has appeared before heads of nations, assemblies of experts, and countless students around the world—and now he joins us to add Town Hall audiences to that list as he joins us to share wisdom from his book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism.

Varoufakis took bankers and politicians to task, sharing letters to his young daughter explaining the historical origins of financial inequality among and within nations. He questioned the pervasive notion that everything has its price and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk. Speaking as a parent who aims to instruct his daughter on the fundamental questions of our age, Varoufakis discussed the inability of market-driven policies to address the rapidly declining health of the planet his daughter’s generation stands to inherit. In a lesson for the benefit of all of us, Varoufakis invited us all to explore the failures and obfuscations of our current system and discuss how we can find our way toward a more democratic economic approach.

Yanis Varoufakis is a former finance minister of Greece and a cofounder of an international grassroots movement, DiEM25, that is campaigning for the revival of democracy in Europe. He is the author of the international bestseller Adults in the Room, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, and The Global Minotaur. After teaching for many years in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, he is currently a professor of economics at the University of Athens.

Recorded live at University Temple Church by Town Hall Seattle on Tuesday, May 15, 2018.