Yanis Varoufakis: No Time for Games in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Yanis Varoufakis: No Time for Games in Europe

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23 pointscyphunk12 comments

The way I see it, he wants to reach not the Nash equilibrium where everybody defects, but the solution which gives a better average payoff but requires collaboration between the different players.

This is the spirit of Europe and the Eurozone, and as a citizen paying my taxes in Euros, I don't mind paying a little more if people in Greece can reconstruct their economy the way they want.

What I don't want is the debt holders being granted a strong voice. The interests exist for a reason, there is a risk, and sometimes people defaults (if only partially).

We need a strong political force to keep the wolves at bay. The finance sector will provide for a stable, but suboptimal, solution.

>If anything, my game-theory background convinced me that it would be pure folly to think of the current deliberations between Greece and our partners as a bargaining game to be won or lost via bluffs and tactical subterfuge.

Nice bluff...

Nice subterfuge.

Article dates from February.

Oh, so the title is wrong: there actually was quite a bit of time.

I am not sure how many people realize that stakes at these negotiations are asymmetric. If EU gives in to Greece's demands, then another EU nation might want to pull off something similar. So in a way a EU's loss would be amplified because of precedence set by this example. Furthermore, Greece could come back again for help because it could not fulfill the promises it makes after the current renegotiations (assuming the went through). In game theory's speak, someone's loss does not equal to someone's gain, which is means non-zero sum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory#Zero-sum_.2F_Non-z...).

A four month old article written by a country’s finance minister. I fail to see how this article is suitable for Hacker News. Flagged.

People who have lived beyond their means want to continue living beyond their means.

Ironic it was a Greek who wrote the Grasshopper and the Ant fable over 2,500 years ago.

You first statement seems like a gross simplification. Trying to summarise a complex situation like Greece in a one-liner or with a fable is unlikely to bring much insight.

Maybe the 50%+ of unemployed youth in Greece just want a future. I doubt many of them were/are living beyond their means. The austerity measures the EU imposed on Greece don't seem to be doing them a lot of good, quite the contrary.

German and French private bankers, for profit, did lend them lots of money they could not afford to lend, indeed, and had to be saved. Yet people complain only about the greeks.

That's a bit a simplistic way to view the situation. Greek People is not a single individual.

To take an analogy, that would be like talking about a family. A cousin you have never met decide to take a loan "in the name of the family" and spend it on himself when you were a kid. Several years later the debt collector knocks on your door and you try to negotiate a deal to save your furniture.

Does "Family who have lived beyond their means want to continue living beyond their means." really describe your situation ? In that situation you would rather not want the cousin to pay ?

Most scholars believe that if Aesop actually existed he was born in Anatolia (Thrace or Phrygia perhaps), entering the Greek world as a slave.

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