Joseph Stiglitz.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz is the ultimate insider-dissenter. The chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and a former senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, Stiglitz has become well known for his criticisms of globalization, the Bush Administration's policies, and, now, the Obama economic team.

Stiglitz first burst into the public consciousness, while still with the World Bank as a "special adviser," when he wrote an article in The New Republic in April 2000 excoriating the International Monetary Fund.

The piece began: "Next week's meeting of the International Monetary Fund will bring to Washington, D.C., many of the same demonstrators who trashed the World Trade Organization in Seattle last fall. They'll say the IMF is arrogant.

They'll say the IMF doesn't really listen to the developing countries it is supposed to help. They'll say the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They'll say the IMF's economic 'remedies' often make things worse--turning slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depressions. And they'll have a point. I was chief economist at the World Bank from 1996 until last November, during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century. I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled."

Then-U.S. Treasury Secretary and President Obama's chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers reportedly offered World Bank President James Wolfensohn a choice: It's either Stiglitz's head or yours. Stiglitz was swiftly ejected.

The following year, Stiglitz received vindication when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work showing how markets operate inefficiently under a variety of circumstances. Ever since then, he has produced a steady stream of articles and books analyzing the world economy (Globalization and Its Discontents and Making Globalization Work ), economic policies at home (The Roaring Nineties ), and the cost of the Bush wars (The Three Trillion Dollar War ). He's currently at work on a book dissecting the economic crisis and "why the economics profession failed so badly" in predicting it, as he told me.

Here in the United States, his heretical views have earned him the reputation of a gadfly. But "when he goes abroad--to Europe, Asia, and Latin America--he is received like a superstar, a modern-day oracle," writes Newsweek . "Stiglitz's work is cited by more economists than anyone else's in the world, according to data compiled by the University of Connecticut."

I interviewed Stiglitz in August at Columbia University, where he's a professor and the founder and head of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a forum to foster debate on economic policy-making. I've met Stiglitz twice now, and have been struck by how jovial and approachable he is. Since a camera crew was busy dismantling equipment in his office, we chatted in a nearby conference room. Our discussion was interrupted by his wife and media handler Anya, who came in with ice cream sandwiches for both of us. Stiglitz spent much of our conversation tackling the ice cream while rocking back and forth in his chair.

Q: In April, you had said that the economy is "going to be bad, very bad." Now what's your assessment?

Joseph Stiglitz: It's still bad. The free fall that we were experiencing in the months after September has been arrested. But it would be wrong to confuse the end of free flail with a robust recovery. Right now, they're saying, "Well, the rate of decline has declined." And, quite possibly, the rate may turn from negative to positive. But every downturn comes to an end. The question is the shape of the recovery. It's...