A Guide to Explaining Capitalism to Your Child: How the Economy Works and Its Potential Shortcomings

Charles-Édouard Lizotte: It isn't really for kids, but it's a good introduction to some economic concepts.

Canada on Oct 23, 2023

Bertolt: This is a very intelligent, very well informed man writing clearly about important things. Five stars for definite.

United Kingdom on Oct 09, 2023

DW: very good

United Kingdom on Sep 21, 2023

Kindle Customer: This book should be required reading for all 16 year olds, maybe then their generation will lead this world to better times.
Thank you for confirming to me that I am not a madman. It has taken 62 years to find someone who agrees with my economic beliefs. A brilliant book!

United Kingdom on Aug 21, 2023

Οδυσσέας: Yanis’ writing is clear and convincing. He makes excellent points in his book, which are very hard to refute. Although I do not espouse his fierce anti religion sentiments, I must admit that he speaks the truth about how belief in any deity has been manipulated to serve the ruling classes in any society. He comes across as a true prophet, which I know, sounds hilarious considering his fierce opposition to religion. This is the second book of his I have read and plan to read more.

United States on Jul 20, 2023

April Cartwright: I have been searching for such a summary for some time. Concurrently reading Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” without any prior knowledge that Varoufis was influenced or that he drew heavily for his first chapter from Diamond. I could not get my 15 year old to read Diamond so am thrilled she can get a broad overview here as well! Highly recommend this book to all.

United States on May 15, 2023

Charles H Garrido, Jr.: As a financial advisor with 40 years experience I finally found a book I can recommend and/or give away.
It is well written, and although a bid wordy at times, it is a great book for a reader regardless of financial experience or astuteness. I actually gave it to my daughter for her birthday along with a gold bracelet.

United States on Mar 14, 2023

Zumi Daniel: Having flunked Economics spectacularly at school, I have always avoided the subject in my adult life. After watching a youtube interview during which this author explained some very complex issues around govt finance, world bank loans, and the plight of his beloved nation (Greece), I realised that I understood every word he said! I was not stupid! I just needed an Economics teacher - this guy is a genius! - who knew how to explain the subject to a disinterested and uninformed audience! Of which I had been one: No longer!

The former Greek minister for finance, Yanis Varoufakis - doting father and gifted teacher of Economics - tried to explain, in simple terms, his work to his daughter, who lives in Australia, far from the Greece in which she grew up and knew well as a younger child.

He uses stories of personalities she knows well, characters from well-known classical literature and even a prison-of-war camp to explain the quite compex ideas he lays out in plain English for the soon-to-be very informed reader. It feels like one is imvited into an avuncular relationship with the author the entire time, but the sense that he is TALKING TO HIS DAUGHTER is tangible from...

United Kingdom on Jan 10, 2023

Trash Gordon: In this captivating account of economics for the unlettered, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis eschews the apparatus of scholarship and explains the subject thru the conceit of a letter to his young daughter living in Australia (that part is not fiction). This provides him a convenient entry into the evolution of markets by tackling the question "Why didn't the Aborigines conquer England?"As he tells the story, he begins to introduce the topics and ideas of economics - exchange value, labor, production, money, interest, et al.

The great virtue of this book, aside from its clarity and wit, is Varoufakis' lesson that economics is not, and can never be, a science after the fashion of physics or chemistry - for one thing, it deals in that most subjective of things - value. The author helps us see that sometimes economics tells stories that not only purport to explain the way things are, but to justify them as well ( Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide does this as well). Toward the end of the book he explains that economics came to substitute as legitimating narratives of the ruling class after religious narratives began to lose currency.

Varoufakis...

United States on Mar 17, 2019

James Kalomiris, The Peripatetic Reader: I have Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, to thank for keeping me up all night reading page and page, to the early hours of the morning, unable to put this book down. Yanis Varoufakis is that rarest of writers who can make the subject of economics interesting. To say this book is a page-turner is an understatement, not because it is a thrilling read with action, but because it is just a beautifully written piece of literature. It is a contemplative work. In this book he attempts to answer the question, “How did we get into this mess?” In answering his question he is thinking through the answer on paper and the result is this book. His tone is pensive, his voice is muted, and his ideas are presented carefully and methodically. That question has been asked before, so his subtitle is “A Brief History of Capitalism,” which is functionally the same. He could have simply answered his question with, “The System,” but that would have been too easy and not enough. So what Varoufakis does is choose significant events in human development, compare those events with responses from other societies, all of which lead to the present economic...

United States on Dec 01, 2017