Classified as science-fiction, Another Now describes the world we now inhabit as accurately as any book on the New York Times best-seller list or by the Times itself.
As often happens in sci-fi, it also describes an alternative world. In this case, one that began in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008. If you ever wondered how things might have gone had the new American president’s promise of “change” been applied to America’s top-heavy, frequently failing economic system, this book offers a credible answer.
A former finance minister of Greece and a current member of the Greek parliament, Yanis Yaroufakis is known internationally for his nonfiction best-sellers, including Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism. He turns to fiction now to show not just what could have been, but what could yet be.
Another Now is set in 2025 but rooted in the early 1980s when an arch-conservative British prime minister’s “greatest triumph… was that she had made it impossible to imagine anyone doing anything unless there was something in it for them.”
Six years ago, America reduced that concept to just two words: “transactional presidency.”
Margaret Thatcher may not have controlled Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, but it is no secret that both American presidents took their cues from her. Reagan’s inaugural address is most noted for a line that Thatcher had been using for years: “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”
So starts the avalanche of financial deregulation that would bury both nations in 2008.
Hi-tekkers might either marvel at or have a field day picking apart the AI formulas that Yaroufakis conjures up to create a portal into an alternative world. Held to that standard, would Jonathan Swift have written Gulliver’s Travels? Would Kurt Vonnegut have given us Slaughterhouse Five?
Literary critics might complain that competing theories of economics drown out the action–something that did not stop Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from being a reformist sensation a century ago. They will also claim that 230 pages comparing the economies of “our now” to this “other now” stunt Yaroufakis’s attempts at character development.
Foremost of those characters is Costa, a scientist who goes rogue when he learns that his own medical advances are withheld by employers who stand to gain more from treatments of disease than from cures. When he discovers the “other now,” he finds that he can communicate with himself years into the future, and he shares his secret with his two closest friends who can then communicate with their parallel selves.
As my friend who recommended the book says, Yaroufakis is more likely to win a Nobel prize for economics than for literature. To which I would add that it may be another category altogether when the novelist turns character development into pure comparison and contrast. Are we to regard Costa and his friends as six characters or three?
What Another Now describes in 2025 and 2036 are far from pure flights of fancy. We are reminded that
Up until the end of the sixteenth century, even global trading outlets like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources to do things that none could accomplish in isolation.
But in 1599, just around the London corner from where Shakespeare was asking “the question,” mercantile capitalism mutated from practicality into speculation when
A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. One could own a piece of the new company without being involved in it, indeed without even telling anyone.
In economic terms, the founding of the East India Trading Company parallels the tasting of forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Following Eden, Adam and Eve had to fend for themselves, and one child warred on another. As of 1599, shareholding begat the “constant struggle to accumulate power over others.”
To counter this, the “other now” is founded upon markets that are free of shareholders and other ruinous forms of speculation. They operate as part of the communities in which they exist and are rated according to “Socialworthiness” described by laws such as the “Social Accountability Act,” regulated by “Citizens’ Juries.”
May sound beyond fantastic, but it’s not that far from the re-emphasis on stakeholders–as opposed to shareholders–that Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren proposed. While reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder if Yaroufakis borrowed from ideas expressed by Andrew Yang in the 2020 Democratic primaries or if Yang borrowed from him.
No doubt right-wingers would slam and ridicule Another Now as rose-colored glasses through which the likes of Stalin and Mao appear appetizing. And no doubt centrist and moderate Americans would recoil at the idea of “markets without capitalism.”
However, we know that economic history works in cycles. America’s economy crashed in the early 90s and again in 2008. With a pandemic wreaking havoc, with many Americans yearning for authoritarian rule, and with the menace of climate change–or “supply chain” as we lately soft-pedal it–hanging over us, it will crash again.
When it does, we can repeat the folly yet again and let our grandchildren suffer the consequences, or we can look elsewhere for a permanent solution.
Yaroufakis offers one–as well as ideas for others–with Another Now.
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From Václav Havel: “Does not the perspective of a better future depend on something like an international community of the shaken, which, ignoring state boundaries, political systems, and power blocs, standing outside the high game of traditional politics, aspiring to no titles and appointments, will seek to make a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power: the phenomenon of human conscience?”
Mouth of the River 