Problem with putting economists into politics is they tend to act on principle,Paul Mason, the Channel 4 News economics editor, on this mornings news that Yanis Varoufakis had resigned as Greeces finance minister.
Others, including the Greek governments creditors, are less favourable in their judgement on Varoufakis, who took his PhD at the University of Essex and gave up a job at the University of Texas at Austin to become finance minister.
Varoufakis, who will feel Greece's referendum result vindicates his insistence that no bailout be agreed without debt relief, says onthat he had beenquietly writing obscure academic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europes inane handling of an inevitable crisis.
Alexis Tsipras, Greeces prime minister, has opted to replace him with another academic economist, Euclid Tsakalotos, the former deputy foreign minister who has been a leading member of the Greek government negotiating team attempting to strike a deal with its creditors.
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Tsakalotos went to school at the private St Pauls in London, studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate, took a masters at the University of Sussex, a PhD at Oxford, then worked as a lecturer at the University of Kent in the early 1990s. He was latterly a professor of economics at National and Kapidistrian University of Athens.
Tsakalotos credentials are already under question after it emerged that he wrote a 2010 paper on the Greek crisis.
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Mason, an experienced Greece watcher, has described Tsakalotos as a who is committed to Euro membership.
Before Varoufakis got the push, the EU appears to have started blaming his academic specialism in game theory for his negotiating tactics.
Varoufakis had calculated that the EU would never allow Greece to exit from the euro and thus the Greek governments negotiations prior to Sundays referendum were fake, according to this version of events. Things happened too fast for game theorist [Varoufakis] to adapt, and not only is he destroying his economy, but has made a huge tactical mistake,.
The EU, the IMF and the ECB have no doubt scrutinised Tsakalotos academic papers already.
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