Now Stiglitz makes more trouble!

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at oregon.uoregon.edu
Thu Jan 27 17:28:55 PST 2000


On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Brad De Long wrote:


> And I shook my head. I looked back at the date on the cover of the
> issue: May/June 1996. And I thought: Hasn't Robert Wade figured
> out--hasn't anyone told Robert Wade--that today, as far as
> development policy is concerned, Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Summers
> are the "U.S. state"?

And what massive, shocking changes in the neoliberal/monetarist model were brought about by the Joe-and-Larry-Show, pray tell? Bourdieu talks a lot about how rigidified power-structures are surprisingly mutable, and how different agents compete for the accumulation of symbolic capital (e.g. rising executives of Fortune 500 companies brand themselves as innovative or what not), with the overall result that nothing really changes in the field in question. Seems to me J & L are both very much the economistic version of what Clinton is in the executive branch: opportunists who know how to add that dash of radical subversion to spice up a basically homogenized, neoliberal portfolio. A fine illustration of the marketplace of the intellect, really.

Wade's article was interesting, but it kind of ducks one crucial aspect of the whole debate: the unsubtle fact that Japanese and EU banks are the primary sources of investment finance for SE Asia, which suggests that the US model has already lost the economic battle and is now in the process of losing the political battle for the region.

-- Dennis



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