A Brief History of Capitalism: Talking to my Daughter about the Economy

by Yanis Varoufakis (2017)


I see from the reviews on Amazon that I am very much in the minority in finding this book a bit of a chore.  Perhaps I'm not sufficiently interested in economics, but I also think it might have had something to do with thinking that if this were my father talking to me like this at the dinner table, however delicious the food, I would have run upstairs, slammed the door shut as loudly as I could, and stayed there until he'd learned to quit mansplaining. 

There were a few ideas that were neat enough, but broadly it was such a partial view of the state of affairs that the book can never be said to have been entirely honest.  We all know capitalism is far from perfect so it would seem fair that Yanis should spend most of the book detailing the history of the emergence of its faults, but he does this all the while apparently hinting at some vastly better, if never described, system which is presumably, given a few deferential references to Marx et al - communism, but when push comes to shove and Yanis gets to the bit where he apparently intends to propose a vastly better system, it all falls apart at the seams, since his suggestions are so vague as to amount to next to nothing and an explicit and balancing critique of the problems of communism is never proferred.  Dishonest.

Rating 3/10




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