Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He teaches economics at Columbia University.

Recent Articles

That Was Then

We live in an upside-down world where Republicans defend deficits and Democrats attack them. These are seemingly opposite views. But both have led, mistakenly, to cuts in social investment as well as to needlessly slow economic growth and high unemployment. For years Republicans tried to slay Keynesian economics, the idea that in an economic downturn, one should run deficits. During the Clinton years, they even pushed for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, which would have enshrined the principles of fiscal prudence (and precluded the Bush deficits). In those years, the Democrats were accused of being fiscally irresponsible because they sensibly believed that in times of recessions, a deficit was good policy. All of this has changed. Ronald Reagan, of course, did run huge deficits, but that was supposedly a mistake. In his "voodoo" economics, tax cuts were supposed to somehow generate more tax revenues, so there was not supposed to be a deficit. Under George Bush Senior...

Globalism's Discontents

F ew subjects have polarized people throughout the world as much as globalization. Some see it as the way of the future, bringing unprecedented prosperity to everyone, everywhere. Others, symbolized by the Seattle protestors of December 1999, fault globalization as the source of untold problems, from the destruction of native cultures to increasing poverty and immiseration. In this article, I want to sort out the different meanings of globalization. In many countries, globalization has brought huge benefits to a few with few benefits to the many. But in the case of a few countries, it has brought enormous benefit to the many. Why have there been these huge differences in experiences? The answer is that globalization has meant different things in different places. The countries that have managed globalization on their own, such as those in East Asia, have, by and large, ensured that they reaped huge benefits and that those benefits were equitably shared; they were able substantially to...