Globalization is a lot like the weather: We all talk about it, mostly complain about it, but no one actually thinks they can do anything about it. While Nobel-winner economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s “Making Globalization Work” (Norton, 2006) is hardly an instruction manual for how individuals can affect this process, it will make those who take the time to read it better informed about that process, and show them how all citizens have the ability to change American policy about how to implement globalization. It’s called voting, and Stiglitz wants to “emphasize how much it matters to whom we entrust key aspects of economic decision making.”
Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank until 2000; prior to that he served in the Clinton administration as chairman of the president’s economic advisers. He now teaches finance and administration at Columbia University; he won his Nobel in 2001.
It is Stiglitz’s belief that “the evidence is overwhelming that [globalization] has failed to live up to [its] potential.” But he argues that “the problem is not with globalization itself, but in the way [it] has been managed.” He (literally) travels the globe to prove his point, from parts of Africa through South American countries to Moldova, Mexico and Turkey, and includes a stop in rural Bangladesh to visit a chicken-feed factory made possible by micro-loans to local women by the Grameen micro-credit bank, founded by Muhammed Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Stiglitz argues that much of what is wrong stems from the piecemeal approach most countries have taken to globalization, environmental issues being a primary victim. Decisions are taken in vacuums and the results have been disastrous: the institutions making them “suffer … from a democratic deficit” and the decisions themselves “are often not in the interests of those in the developing world.” Stiglitz makes his case compellingly. The picture is often grim, but Stiglitz’s optimism and intelligence are convincing and his message clear: This can work if we but go about it the right way. It’s not too late yet.
