'Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism' by Yanis Varoufakis

Reviewed by Pranav Minasandra

08 Oct 2023

Varoufakis has had first-hand experience watching economies collapse—an insider perspective, as the Greek Minister of Finance during its attempts at recovery from a catastrophic debt crisis in 2015. In this book (the only book on economics that I’ve actually been able to read end-to-end), he starts at the very beginning, when people became people. Varoufakis takes us through where money and currency originated, why banking is relevant, how stock markets emerged from the ash and smoke of the industrial revolutions, and how bitcoins will never work as a major currency. It’s one of the most readable popular economics books, and makes a lot of sense out of an evolved, and ever-evolving, concept.

Evolved concepts are amazing—most of the pillars of our life and civilisation that we take for granted seem to have popped out of thin air at the time humanity stood up on two legs and looked to the skies. Where, for instance, do these things come from—language, cities, story-telling, traditions, fashion, art, religion? These are phenomena that have evolved with us, and the study of any of them is infinitely fascinating and commensurately, I imagine, hard. It’s especially hard for folks who study money, and the economy, because it’s a subject as dry as grass before a firestorm.

Yanis Varoufakis’ writing has a unique tone—this book is written as a (one-sided) conversation between a father and a daughter, where the father attempts to explain why there is so much inequality in the world. As a result of this framing, the style of writing is very honest and frank—not expected from a book by an economist. Varoufakis does not hesitate to allege that economists are more philosophers than scientists, or that commodification-driven markets will never achieve a happier, better standard of living. When pondering about the future, he details the various options available to us as a civilisation, but does not shy away from the socialist option which he finds most suitable.

This book is definitely a must-read if you, like me, have never quite been able to answer questions like ‘why exactly is there inflation?’, or ‘how exactly do banks get so much money in the first place?’. Rather than the hand-wavy analogies of Robinson Crusoe’s island or some other distant, sterile world, Varoufakis’ chapters focus on the world as it is, and desribe why he thinks things are the way they are. This empiricism, mixed with its honest speculative nature, is delightful to read when applied to economics, and I would love to read similar books on other evolved concepts as well.