Yanis Varoufakis
speaker
1,142 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 3 May
Yanis Varoufakis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, no, no.
It wasn't there.
It actually was pretty good.
Okay.
I decided economics is a religion with equations, whether it's taught at Essex, LSE, or Harvard for that matter.
And this is why I decided that, you know, I'm going to study mathematics because if I'm going to study mathematics, I might as well study first-class mathematics rather than a third-class mathematics, which is what economics is.
What economics had become by the time I went to university.
It wasn't like that under Keynes.
You know, economics went through a huge transformation, which is actually quite detrimental to the capacity of economists to understand capitalism.
So, I thought I had escaped economics until my years as a master's student of mathematics, of mathematical statistics.
This is a cute story.
I was looking for a thesis to complete my master's degree at the University of Birmingham, which was on mathematical statistics.
And one night, I made a mistake.
It was too late at night, and I went to the wrong floor of the Birmingham University Library.
I was looking for mathematical papers in order to be inspired to find something to write my thesis on.
And I was on the floor where the economics journals were.
So I picked up randomly in the middle of the night a copy of the American Economic Review.
And I opened it.
And lo and behold, I fell on an article written by an MIT economics professor, which was highly mathematical, which was of interest to me.
And which purported to prove mathematically and statistically that in negotiations between employers and trade unions, employers are super rational and trade unions are mechanistic idiots who resist stupidly until at some point they no longer resist.
Showing 141–160 of 1,142 · page 8 of 58
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