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Title: The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade by Joseph E. Stiglitz ISBN: 0-393-05852-2 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.73 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Informative and Brilliant
Comment: Of all the work I've read on current economic events, this is the best. Buy it.
It's hard to think of a man more qualified to write such a book as this one. Joseph Stiglitz is perhaps America's leading economist. For the last few decades he has made enormous contributions to numerous fields (hence his Nobel Prize), and he was on the front lines of economic policymaking in the Clinton administration and the World Bank. For people who are used to getting economic 'wisdom' from non-economists, Stiglitz's book is a refreshing splash in the face of rigorous economic thinking.
This book has numerous merits. Most prominent, perhaps, is Stiglitz's encyclopedic command of the issues: deficit reduction, telecom deregulation, the California energy crisis, the 1997 tax cuts, Enron, creative accounting, the IMF, Fed interest rates, stock options, banking regulation - you name it. More important, though, is the analytical sophistication with which Stiglitz approaches these issues. There's no graphs or differential equations (this isn't a technical work) but you can feel Stiglitz's genius at work cutting through all of the BS.
Stiglitz sees the 1990s as a brilliant economic success, but also a period in which faulty accounting, conflicts of interest, and botched deregulation schemes inflated a bubble that, when it burst, gave rise to the 2001 recession. This is not a partisan tract ("More regulation! Punish big business!"), but Stiglitz has vast disagreements with the free market camp in the GOP and the New Democrats who see lower taxes and less regulation as the solution to every problem. His disagreements with them are not ideological, but economic.
Where ideology does come in is his commitment to social justice - he clearly wants to tax the rich to help out the people on the bottom. But Stiglitz doesn't disguise these views as economic analysis: he sets aside a chapter to describe his vision for the world economy. Also, while he feels that Greenspan pays too much attention to inflation and not enough to growth, he doesn't impose his views as the right ones - he simply suggests that the Fed's priorities be open to political debate rather than left up to the Fed. It's clear that Stiglitz is a liberal, but he's very self-conscious. He writes in a humble, delicate tone that expresses his views, seeks to back them up, and admits that his values are different from those of the GOP.
You won't agree with everything he says (I certainly didn't), but it's still a really fantastic contribution to the debate over the bubble and the recession. Nobody writing about recent economic history has more credibility than Stiglitz does, and it's a great read.
I must say I am annoyed by the other reviewers who try to pass themselves off as economists and point out the supposed "flaws" with Stiglitz's book. True, there's a lot in Stiglitz's book to disagree with, but you're not going to find objective economic analysis on Amazon.com customer reviews. It's also totally false that Stiglitz dismisses the significance of the economic boom of the 1990s or that he denies the important role that deficit reduction played in fueling the boom.
For me, Stiglitz's book was a courageous intervention into really critical and contentious issues by one of the century's leading economic geniuses. Since the corporate governance scandals died down, there's been an unfortunate lull in the discussion of issues like stock options and financial accounting, but the debates that Stiglitz contributes to are debates that we need to have. I'm buying a copy of this book for a number of my friends. It's timely and brilliant.
Rating: 4
Summary: Another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into...
Comment: I profited just as much as the next person from the booming business in the 90's. I also was one of its victims. We all were and, as usual, there we're federal policies, greedy individuals and corporations and dishonesty that when mixed in with the prosperity helped undermine it. Certainly there are always periods of booms and busts--it's how we deal with aftermath and the excesses that matter.
Stiglitz's well written book examines the process of creation and the decay and corruption that can help undo these bursts of economic activity. Stiglitz doesn't point the finger at any one group of individuals more than another--he feels comfortable doling out the blame where it belongs and Washington is just as much a target as corporate America. Without the political stilts to support economic circus we all participate in, it would never happen. As a reflection on what's wrong (and occasionally right) with America's political and economic system, The Roaring Nineties is unstinting look at the harshness and ugliness underneath the system. It's also a book that argues for reform in a way to keep the economy moving without allowing criminal profiteering.
Rating: 1
Summary: He Actually Won A Nobel in Economics?
Comment: Stiglitz does not believe in free markets or that free markets are efficient. His cure for many of the market ills is to expand governments role in business. Stiglitz explains why deregulation caused so many problems in the areas of communications and banking and uses examples today to attempt to prove his points.
The problem with Stiglitz's examples of why deregulation is bad, is that the markets were already bad prior to deregulation. The markets were deregulated because they were doing poorly. He describes the economic choices of Reagan as damaging the economic gains of Carter. Not in those words exactly, but real close. His reality is that we were recovering from bad decisions of the Reagan administration, not of previous administration. To be fair of course, all financial decisions and budgets during that period were solely up to the president, congress and the senate were not allowed to vote on those matters at all.(hint: they were democrat controlled and he is a democrat and they did pass the rules and budgets with Reagan)
He argues that the bubble of the 1990's was due to irrational exuberance. That the prices of stocks were driven up for no reason and Alan Greenspan spoke and the investors didn't listen. In all of his explanations he fails to mention that during this era of the internet, millions of people began investing in the stock market who had never done so before and wouldn't listen to Greenspan's speechs or react to them. They drove the market, Stiglitz missed the boat. You can't describe today's economy in relation to yesterday's economy, they are barely related by the same currency.
Stiglitz does manage to point to a characteristic of capitalism. However he does so with the resolve of a die hard socialist. In a free market, people compete for market share and it drives profits down. Some businesses actually fail and others survive. We knew that. His disdain of freemarkets is just exemplified by his discription of this phenomenon as a failure and an inefficiency. If competition drives profit down, isn't the consumer the winner?
The book argues for government control of markets. His view is that several really smart fellows such as himself are infinitely better equiped to dictate business and markets than the thousands of businessman who do it daily. He argues that the government made rules that allowed business to do bad things, so more control by this same government could fix those wrongs. He does understand that government helped companies like World Com steal money, he just argues that this same government group could now help them be honest. If a table spoon is bad, a gallon will cure?
It is another socialist view of economics. If you want another guy who says capitalism is bad, socialism is the fix, read this book. If you want a good review of real economics during the 1990's, don't bother.
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Title: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman ISBN: 0393058506 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz ISBN: 0393324397 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington by Robert E. Rubin, Jacob Weisberg ISBN: 0375505857 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 18 November, 2003 |
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Title: In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati ISBN: 0195170253 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (Raffaele Mattioli Lectures) by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Bruce Greenwald ISBN: 0521008050 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 04 September, 2003 |
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