better left-capitalist economist?

[© tweed]

Stiglitz is of course way more imaginative and broader minded and etc.  Krugman has been writing about the same three things for a long time now... who knows how Stiglitz would function if he had to write two columns a week, but we can say he is smart enough not to get wrapped up in such an anti-intellectual exercise.

liberal economists piss me off though every once in a while.. I was reading Stiglitz' intro to Polanyi's Great Transformation 2001 edition and he was writing about mass unemployment, and made some comment like 'then again maybe capitalists don't mind mass unemployment because it provides downward pressure on wages, but we economists see this as a structural failure...'  and I'm thinking, dude, Marx figured out that capitalists engineer unemployment way back in 1860, where have you been?  wearing a suit at the World Bank?