You might know Varoufakis as the new Greek Finance Minister who basically has the world by the throat. I came to know him via his previous job at Valve as a market analyst/director/weird practical research guy. When he was at Valve, he was solving problems around aggregate wealth and dealing with inflationary markets; he seems to be doing the same in Greece.

I love the video above because Varoufakis’ Marxism is laid bare. He cares about process and knotty problems, and he has literally zero time for any theory of economics that doesn’t take those very Real issues seriously. I also enjoy that he takes the Piketty phenomenon to a meta and ideological level in order to contextualize it while explaining that critiquing it as a phenomenon. He doesn’t say that Piketty produces a particular ideology therefore he is bad. Instead, he says that Piketty produces bad ideology that doesn’t sew up the problems that it claims to, which could allow for some real assholes to dismiss Piketty too easily. That’s the kind of critique I’m down with.

Above all, I enjoy Varoufakis because he’s clearly a theory-heavy thinker who wants to make that theory available to the public in a graspable way. He’s packaging for educational consumption, and I think that’s some of the best public intellectual work that one can do.