I’ve finally finished Varoufakis. Lots of Post-It notes on the pages, which I’ll have to decode in the coming days, but I suppose the most interesting (and, well, expected) thing was that Varoufakis finally comes out of the closet as an orthodox Marxist. I mean, all the way through the book, I was going, “Why, with such devastating critiques, is there so little Marx in here?” Turns out he was saving it for the last chapter.
It’s a little disappointing to discover that what appeared to be a relatively evenhanded and insightful critique of the conventional economic wisdom comes from the only place that one might expect. Makes me wonder if anybody’s ever done a Derridean reading of the neoclassicist/Marxist binary.
Anyway, there were a lot of really interesting insights, judging from the number of pink Post-Its I left on the pages. Consider Varoufakis on market-god Milton Friedman: “Friedman’s view that governments should not be attempting to ‘manage’ employment was founded on the simple neoclassical idea that if a commodity is not scarce, then it has no value; its price must be zero. If its price is not zero, it must be scarce and, therefore, in equilibrium there can be no unsold units of that commodity. Similarly, if the wage is non-zero all those who want to work for that wage will, in equilibrium, find a job. If the government tries to increase the number of those in employment further by borrowing and spending, all it will achieve is more inflation. In the long run employment levels will be the same” (282). Needless to say, I don’t buy this, mostly because of the posited first principles on scarcity. (I know I’m not even one one-hundredth as smart as a Nobel laureate in economics, or one one-thousandth as well-read, so I’m not calling Friedman’s reasoning into question, but simply saying that I start from different assumptions.) Furthermore, I think it’s worth considering (as Varoufakis does) that the fashionability of Friedman’s free-market anti-interventionism is largely a historical product of the economic crises (the combination of unemployment and inflation that originated with the actions of OPEC) of the 1970s. Interesting, in that light, to consider Friedman’s comment that “We are all Keynesians now.”
It’s also interesting, I think, to consider how an “information economy” that doesn’t rely on scarcity as a first principle — or that, at least, has to artifically construct scarcity via password-protected documents and the like — might reconstruct Friedman’s economic arguments.
I read that last paragraph and had one of those *click* moments. Beautifully obvious and subtly profound at the same time.
Information is rightly said not to be scarce; so, too, with the raw materials of education? Is it expertise that’s scarce? Or is there something else I’m not seeing? What accounts for the fact that education is a commodity, rather than, well, a fact?
Must think more about this.
Milton Friedman would say (higher) education is a commodity because it has a price. But we don’t usually think of primary and secondary education as commodities, do we? As you say, they’re assumed to be pretty much a fact. So higher education is a commodity because some people have it and others don’t; because it’s scarce? But now, of course, I’m going in circles.
One wonders what the class systems in the European countries where higher education is free are like.
Also wondering about your terms: what are “the raw materials of education”? Can you say more about “expertise”?