Written by John Lounsbury
This program, streamed live 27 April 2020, presents two of the most politically-involved economists in the world today. Yanis Varoufkis is an economics professor who has also been a national government minister (Minister of Finance in Greece, 1915). Stephanie Kelton, also an economics professor, has been Chief Economist for Senate Budget Committee Democrats and economic advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders.
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From Wikipedia:
Stephanie Kelton (née Bell; born October 10, 1969) is an American economist and academic. She is currently a professor at Stony Brook University[1] and was formerly a professor University of Missouri – Kansas City.[2] She also served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
She is founder and editor-in-chief of the blog New Economic Perspectives. She was named one of Politico‘s 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016.”[3][4] In fall 2019, she joined the board of Matriarch PAC.[5]
Kelton studied Business Finance and Economics at the California State University, Sacramento, earning a B.S. and a B.A. in 1995. She received a Rotary scholarship to study Economics at the University of Cambridge, receiving her Master’s degree in 1997. On a fellowship from Christ’s College, Cambridge, Kelton then spent a year at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. She obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School in 2001 with her dissertation, “Public Policy and Government Finance: A Comparative Analysis Under Different Monetary Systems.”
Kelton is currently a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University and was formerly the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. She was a research scholar at the UMKC Center for Full Employment and Price Stability[6] and the Levy Economics Institute in upstate New York.[7]
Kelton is editor-in-chief of the New Economic Perspectives blog.[8]
On December 26, 2014, Kelton was designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, a post that she held in 2015 and early 2016, when she left that position to become an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign.[9]
On May 25, 2017, Stony Brook University announced that Kelton would join the university: “This fall as a professor in the forthcoming Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice.”[10] Kelton follows her husband Paul’s appointment at Stony Brook as the first Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History, established in February 2016, at the College of Arts and Sciences.[10]
In 2019, Kelton has been invited to be the Geoff Harcourt Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia.[11]
Also from Wikipedia:
Ioannis “Yanis” Varoufakis (Greek: Ιωάννης Γεωργίου “Γιάνης” Βαρουφάκης, romanized: Ioflnnis Georg’ou “Giflnis” Varoufflkis, pronounced [ˈʝanis varuˈfakis]; born 24 March 1961)[2][3] is a Greek economist, academic, philosopher and politician. He has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, a left-wing political party, since he founded it in 2018. A former member of Syriza, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Varoufakis was a member of the Hellenic Parliament for Athens B from January to September 2015; he regained a parliamentary seat in July 2019.
Varoufakis was born in Athens in 1961 and attended Moraitis School before moving to the United Kingdom, where he studied mathematics at the University of Essex before attaining a postgraduate degree in mathematical statistics at University of Birmingham and a PhD in economics at Essex. He began a career in academic economics, teaching at the universities of Essex, East Anglia and Cambridge between 1982 and 1988. Following Margaret Thatcher‘s third election victory in 1987, Varoufakis left the UK and moved to Australia, where he taught at the University of Sydney until 2000. After eventually acquiring Australian citizenship, he returned to Greece that year to teach at the University of Athens, where he led a doctoral program and was promoted to full professor in 2005. Following this, Varoufakis had periods of advising George Papandreou and working as the economist-in-residence for Valve before moving to the United States to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. Varoufakis has published a number of texts on economics and game theory, such as The Global Minotaur.
In January 2015, Varoufakis was appointed Greek Minister of Finance. He led negotiations with Greece’s creditors during the government-debt crisis. However, he failed to reach an agreement with the European troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund) leading to the 2015 bailout referendum. The referendum rejected the troika bailout terms, and the day afterwards Varoufakis resigned as Minister of Finance, being replaced by Euclid Tsakalotos. On 24 August, Varoufakis voted against the third bailout package; in the ensuing September snap election, he did not stand for reelection. Varoufakis has since appeared in numerous debates, lectures and interviews. In February 2016, he launched the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) and subsequently backed a Remain vote in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. In March 2018, he founded MeRA25, the “electoral wing” of DiEM25 in Greece.[4] In the 2019 legislative election, MeRA25 was the sixth most voted-for party, amassing nine parliamentary seats, with Varoufakis himself returning to the Hellenic Parliament.
In December 2018, Varoufakis launched the Progressive International with United States Senator Bernie Sanders.[5][6]
From YouTube:
Welcome to DiEM25 TV’s ANOTHER NOW. The program that owes its existence to a mindless virus that placed capitalism in suspended animation, something not even WW2 managed to do. The one-hour discussion every Monday where, together with a weird and wonderful guest, we rant and rave with one ambition in our souls: To prevent a return to normality once the pandemic passes.
This week I have the honour and the privilege to be joined by Stephanie Kelton – an academic economist who felt the need to throw her lot in with Bernie Sanders, become his chief economic adviser and use her economic knowledge to fight the good fight not just in academia but wherever economic mystification is utilised against the many.
Source: YouTube
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