A review by jiyoung
Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis
3.0
The “Other Now” is an alternate universe that forked from “Our Now” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In this Other Now, banks weren’t bailed out but instead made to fail, and post-capitalistic organizations sprouted in their place to give individuals greater equality, equity, and dignity in society. This book is essentially a thought exercise of how the world could work with an alternative to capitalism. It was interesting to see Varoufakis’s musings on how enterprise, money, and society could function outside of the directive to capture rent and maximize profits for the select few.
My gripes were really in the structure of the book. I was fully expecting this to be a novel wherein we’d be shown these new institutions in organic worldbuilding. Unfortunately the characters do a LOT of telling, not showing. It’s less a novel than a detailed manifesto delivered by characters that have names and a pet ideology and not much more. I also felt like a lot of his thought experiments required a little too much suspension of disbelief re: human nature and individual greed (e.g., you’re not going to get companies like Amazon to crumble bc the world boycotted for a day, nor are you going to convince that many people to boycott in the first place).
My gripes were really in the structure of the book. I was fully expecting this to be a novel wherein we’d be shown these new institutions in organic worldbuilding. Unfortunately the characters do a LOT of telling, not showing. It’s less a novel than a detailed manifesto delivered by characters that have names and a pet ideology and not much more. I also felt like a lot of his thought experiments required a little too much suspension of disbelief re: human nature and individual greed (e.g., you’re not going to get companies like Amazon to crumble bc the world boycotted for a day, nor are you going to convince that many people to boycott in the first place).