>The willingness of Mr. Stiglitz to criticize financial markets, and to even
>suggest that limited government intervention could be positive, puts him at
>odds with the Washington policy consensus led by the IMF and the Treasury.
>Explaining his concerns about Russia, Mr. Stiglitz said the West assumed
>that a rules-based legal and financial infrastructure would emerge
>''spontaneously'' and ''that all we needed to do was privatize.''
>
>But he said that ''privatization by itself has not been a guarantee for
>success.'' Rather than becoming wealthier, he said, Russia has become poorer.
Stiglitz's fatal speech was a bewdy, I reckon. He couldn't bring himself to go quite where he was heading with it, mind - but then he had invested thirty years of his life in the sort of thinking that did the damage in the first place, and it wouldn't be fair to expect a middle-aged man consciously to undo the raison d'etre of a whole career in one blow.
He did pose questions that even the born-again institutionalist in him couldn't answer (on, for instance, the danger of an effectively autonomous [eg. socially disembedded] market; on how to stop chaoplexic finance markets doing to ANYBODY what they did to 200 million Asians in '97/8; on what to do to avoid the effects of the sudden maturity of a long-dominant sector; on why structural arrangements that used to work should now be considered non-applicable; on why the thrust of his observations of Asia shouldn't be extended to the structures and processes of western economies; and on how to keep even the formal cosmetics of democracy looking real under Wall/Bond Street rule), and there should be enough in that alone for leftie economists to get a usefully public grip, no?
No?
Cheers, Rob.