Greece's Brain Drain Has Begun

By the end of 2011, Yanis Varoufakis was a celebrity. The director of the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Athens, Varoufakis had been arguing for two years that Greece was insolvent and the country should default while staying in the euro region. In late December, after a day when supporters mobbed him on the street and abusive phone calls reached him at home, his wife told him, “Either enter politics or we must leave the country.” So, as many of his students and professors had already, Varoufakis left.

It was a hard decision. After training and teaching abroad, Varoufakis returned to Athens in 2000 to build a Ph.D. program to solve one of his profession’s problems: the excessive reliance on economic models that often failed to predict what happened in the real economy. His curriculum, which expected students to master the demanding math of models while learning the history and philosophy that debunked them, drew praise from prominent economists such as Axel Leijonhufvud at the University of California at Los Angeles and James Galbraith at the University of Texas at Austin. “I have a fair feel for his perspective and we are kindred spirits in some ways,” Galbraith writes in an e-mail. The program lured foreign Ph.D. candidates and brought Greek students home.