Talking to My Daughter About the Economy by Yanis Varoufakis

Author:Yanis Varoufakis [Varoufakis, Yanis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The human element

Houses, cars, food and entertainment bring their own rewards and are desirable in their own right. In contrast, hired labour and borrowed money are only means to an end. Entrepreneurs are forced to lease them in order to produce things of exchange value, but they would love to live their lives without ever having to hire a single worker or borrow a single penny.

If the economy is the engine of society and debt is its fuel, then labour is the spark, the life-breathing force that animates that engine, while money is the lubricant without which that engine would seize up. It is poignant that both have the capacity to drive the engine but also to bring it to a standstill and prevent it from starting again. Taken together, they prevent the smooth operation that unemployment deniers and their fellows believe in and rule out a simple world in which unemployment disappears if wages fall sufficiently and savings are turned into jobs and equipment if the interest rate finds its ‘right’ level.

You may now be wondering whether something might be done to tame and control these demons. Is there no way to break the cycles of self-fulfilling prophecy and self-perpetuating pessimism? The answer is: it ain’t going to be easy. The demons that turn the labour and money markets into market society’s scourges are an expression of some of the very things that make us human: our ability to reflect on our own and others’ behaviour, to inhabit others’ minds and predict their actions, and to know that for all our cleverness and wisdom we and others rarely resist the short-term impulse for self-preservation, however self-defeating it may ultimately prove to be. To reconcile the messy, contradictory, irrational and perverse behaviour of humans with the smooth functioning of an idealized economic machine would require a rethink and a reorganization of society every bit as radical as the transformation of the Great Reversal that took place in eighteenth-century Britain.

Nevertheless, we are in the midst of one right now. It is the process of mechanization and automation, of digitalization and artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it would appear to be taking us in the opposite direction to a solution, for its aim is not to reconcile human and machine but to replace the first with the second. But while the human spirit may be the greatest victim of this change, it is likely to prove our salvation too.

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