Articles

"Impure Thoughts"

Waiting for perfectly "clean" opportunities to apply your principles means you could lose them altogether.

Reason , August/September 2000

Poor Joe Stiglitz. Here he is, an eminent economist, on everyone's short list for a Nobel Prize. He writes a perfectly respectable New Republic cover story about the failings of the International Monetary Fund. He's particularly concerned that IMF policies make poor countries experiencing recessions poorer and more depressed. The article makes a big splash. Yet when all the publicity is over, Stiglitz has become the intellectual poster child for anti-trade, anti-growth fanatics. What happened?