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Monday, May 1, 2017
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Lawrencekhoo
Photo license: CC BY 3.0
Joseph Stiglitz (1943-now) is a famous economist best known his contributions to information economics and his critique of laissez faire economic polices. Stiglitz is also the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. Wikipedia says,
"[Stiglitz] is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls 'free market fundamentalists') and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." (Wikipedia: Joseph Stiglitz, 7.30.21 UTC 23:40)
The rest of this post is some quotes from Stiglitz.
"The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism." (Interview with the Huffington Post, 2008)
"The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there." (Interview with the International Herald Tribune, 2006)
"They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations..." (New York Times, 2007)
"The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient." (Whither Socialism? 1994)