On Oct 3, 2007, at 2:07 PM, Sean Andrews quoted:
> * The persistence of straw-man arguments. In a recent book review,
> Columbia economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, the author
> of Globalization and Its Discontents, wrote of Milton Friedman and
> others' "belief in the perfection of market economies on models that
> assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk
> markets.... They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical
> foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed,
> academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for
> instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always."
> In an e-mail, Klein called this characterization "simply untrue":
> Friedman and other like-minded theorists simply believed that "in most
> instances, free markets are less bad than the alternative."
When Stiglitz refers to "economists [who] were explaining the limitations of markets" of the information asymmetry sort, he's basically talking about himself and a few colleagues (like Akerlof).
Doug