[Joseph Stiglitz] looks like a caricature of a Wicked Capitalist from a Bolshevik propaganda poster circa 1917. You know: the one where a pig-like businessman rests his feet on a perspiring, emaciated worker and spoons caviar into his fleshy gob. Stiglitz is round and portly, with braces to hold up his trousers. He has a big grin, worn on a mouth that looks like it was born to hold a fat cigar. Yet he is one of the most important left-wing economic and political thinkers of our time, and his agenda cuts to the heart of the most urgent moral issue in the world: mass poverty. (Johann Hari, Independent on Sunday, 9 November 2003)
Though these banner-wavers hog the headlines and disrupt the streets, they pose no serious threat to the two Bretton Woods institutions [the IMF and the World Bank] Their goals (such as ‘end capitalism’) are too absurd; their arguments too incoherent. But this year, more than most, the IMF faces criticism from a more serious source – those inside rather than outside the barricades. A growing chorus of insiders, from staff members (sotto voce) to Wall Street bankers (more loudly), is asking whether the Fund and the rich countries that largely determine its policies know what they are doing. (Economist, 26 September 2001)
This lecture is based on my chapter in Babylon looking at the anti-capitalist capitalists, in particular George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz
Soros
Stiglitz
Against Washington
Both individuals have been hostile to the Washington consensus
Soros and Stiglitz as Keynesians
Asymetric information and reflexivity
Karl Polanyi
Vaccinating against anti-capitalism?
The variants of Capitalism debate
Seminar Questions
1. Do you agree that Soros and Stiglitz can be conceptualised as Keynesians?
2. Why do they criticise the ‘Washington Consensus?
3. Outline and evaluate Karl Polanyi’s ideas in The Great Transformation’?
4. How might other critiques of globalisation challenge Soros and Stiglitz?
Further Reading
Cammack, P. (2002) Attacking the Poor, New Left Review January-February 2002, pp. 125–34
Latham, R. (1997) ‘Globalization and Democratic Provisionism; Re-reading Polanyi’, New Political Economy, 2: 53-63.
Soros, G. (1998) The Crisis of Global Capitalism. London: Little, Brown and Co.
Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents. London: Allen Lane
Wall (2005) Ch 2.
www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/
DVDs, etc
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Big ideas that changed the world : Joseph Stiglitz on capitalism / produced & directed by James Strong. |
2005. | 15829 |
New-radical-political-economy 
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