In former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’ now-legendary memoir “Adults in the Room,” he recounts a conversation with Larry Summers, conducted in a Washington hotel bar late on a spring night in 2015 over (one imagines) glasses of excellent single-malt Scotch. The former Treasury secretary and Harvard president was, in effect, making the charismatic young radical — a newly-minted official in Greece’s left-wing government — an offer of the sort you’re not supposed to refuse.

Varoufakis had to choose, Summers suggested, between being an insider or an outsider:

“The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacros

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