Not such a low and dishonest decade

If it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in love with economics,

I wanted to understand what caused the poverty, unemployment and discrimination that I had seen all around me growing up, and I wanted to do something about these problems.

Stiglitz spent much of his early career in universities and made important advances in such highly theoretical areas of economics as the understanding of ‘information asymmetries’, which led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for economics. But in 1993 he became Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton. An active and controversial decade close to real-world policy-making followed, with a stint as Chief Economist at the World Bank between 1997 and 1999, culminating in sharp polemics with the International Monetary Fund.