Free market heretics.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh

George Soros on Globalization By George Soros PublicAffairs. 191 pages. $20.00.

Globalization and Its Discontents By Joseph E. Stiglitz W.W. Norton & Company. 282 pages. $24.95.

Globalization is not benefiting the worlds poor. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) serves the interests of Wall Street. The free market system is amoral. Richer nations, especially the United States, need to be far more generous in their aid-giving.

These assertions may seem self-evident to many progressives, but oh, what joy when both a Nobel Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank and a billionaire former currency trader express them. The cheerleaders of corporate-imposed globalization can dismiss neither of these authors as marginal anti-capitalist cranks.

This is not the first time that Soros and Stiglitz have expressed doubts about "market fundamentalism" and the U.S.-imposed "Washington Consensus" on the developing world and former communist countries. Stiglitz has been critical of it ever since his days at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000, and his heretical views reportedly led then-Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers to get him fired.

Soros has recast himself as the thinking person's capitalist and a major philanthropist in recent years, after making tons of money by speculating on currencies. He has become a prolific writer, expounding in several articles and books his thesis that unless capitalism has some moral underpinnings it has the potential to tear society apart.

Stiglitz's and Soros's current books arrive at a propitious moment. Globalization has received several body blows this year. The collapse of Argentina, once a star pupil of the international financial institutions, was a direct hit. So were the financial scandals on Wall Street. After all, the IMF had been lecturing countries to have "transparent" markets like those in the United States, but after Enron and WorldCom this turned out to be a bad joke. Even that journal of elite opinion, The New York Times, is beginning to question globalization, notably in columns by Paul Krugman and in an August 18 Sunday magazine cover story ("The Free-Trade Fix," by Tina Rosenberg). It's a wonderful time for Soros and Stiglitz to bolster the side of the angels.

Stiglitz's book is a sustained blast at the IMF and, by association, the U.S. Treasury Department, which, according to Stiglitz, dictates IMF policies. In chapter after chapter, he slams the IMF for its mishandling of recent...