{"id":2798,"date":"2008-07-22T04:21:25","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T04:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2798"},"modified":"2008-07-22T04:21:25","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T04:21:25","slug":"reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2798","title":{"rendered":"Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Globalization and Its Discontents<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0by Joseph Stiglitz<\/strong><\/p>\n

A partially wrongheaded book but an interesting one.<\/p>\n

I say “partially” because Stiglitz intermixes sophisticated and nuanced\u00a0understanding of market function and evolution\u00a0with –\u00a0at times,\u00a0intellectually comical –\u00a0bromide level asides for the anticapitalist yahoos who never took Econ 101 but want to lean on\u00a0the intellectual authority of his Nobel Prize\u00a0as they argue across the kitchen table. The second aspect that I find intriguing with Stiglitz\u00a0so far, is that his (admittedly one-sided) description of the IMF is of an insular, stovepiped, hierarchical, rigidly dysfunctional institution that ignores empirical results of it’s policies and actions. That part I can well believe.<\/p>\n

Stiglitz, who has an overriding leftish\u00a0political agenda, blames\u00a0IMF institutional culture\u00a0on “market fundamentalism” of the Chicago school of economics,\u00a0but\u00a0he’s describing an organizational-informational behavioral pattern common to most\u00a0second wave, industrial era bureaucracies. One shared by the US military, the IC, academia and (formerly) by IBM and most institutions of the decidely non-free market Soviet Union. The IMF simply isn’t the home for P2P networks and it acts like the lumbering dinosaur it is – large, brutish, powerful but slow on the uptake and oblivious to much of what goes on around it.<\/p>\n

In a sense, though I’m sure Stiglitz never thought of it this way, he’s calling for economic COIN for developing nations rather than\u00a0the 2GW version of market\u00a0liberalization practiced in post-Soviet Russia. That’s a meritorious point but I inclined to think that the heavy left politicking Stiglitz\u00a0sprinkes in his writing\u00a0will prevent that message from reaching ears that might otherwise be receptive.<\/p>\n

The choir he’s preaching to is in no hurry to open up markets anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Globalization and Its Discontents\u00a0by Joseph Stiglitz A partially wrongheaded book but an interesting one. I say “partially” because Stiglitz intermixes sophisticated and nuanced\u00a0understanding of market function and evolution\u00a0with –\u00a0at times,\u00a0intellectually comical –\u00a0bromide level asides for the anticapitalist yahoos who never took Econ 101 but want to lean on\u00a0the intellectual authority of his Nobel Prize\u00a0as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133,332,344,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-economics","category-gap","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}