[PEN-L:29558] Re: Liu on Stiglitz

[Ben Day <day@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think these are at all comparable - Stiglitz is not recanting a
former policy position that he defended. Where is this the case? He has
certainly "come out of the closet," as it were, with his criticisms of the
IMF and the Treasury Dept. in recent years, but he hasn't implied that he
was personally complicit in these institutions' actions, and seems to stand
by his own track record w.r.t. development aid and growth policy. We've
seen Krugman recently say that, in effect, he had bought into much of the
Washington Consensus. (Although he doesn't say specifically what; one might
surmise in the context of the Brazilian bailout, that it involves
unwarranted optimism about the potential for bailout packages in general,
but which ones? And why? He has always waxed enthusiastic about Clinton's
Mexico bailout - has he changed his tune on this? If not, how is Brazil
different?) But I don't see the grounds for lumping the two together, as
Liu does.

Am I missing a significant expression of recantation here? Saying that he's
recently been considering the necessity of abolishing the IMF and "starting
over" is not a reversal of position, it's a change in tactics (albeit a
very significant one). It doesn't mean that his criticisms of the IMF are
any different, or even that he now wants a different type of international
financial institution - just that he's marking out a different path for
abandoning the former and arriving at the latter.

-----Ben

At 09:22 AM 8/17/2002 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Stiglitz keeps reminding me of McNamara, a former president of the World
> Bank. Beginning in 1961, President Kennedy began to send military advisors
> to Saigon to explore the question whether local Vietnamese forces could,
> by training, be brought up to the level of expertise required to fight a
> guerilla war against troops of a people's liberation army from Hanoi. His
> Secretary of Defense was Robert S. McNamara, one of the so-called Whiz
> Kids at the Ford Motor Company, who with his systems analysis and mission
> oriented deployment assure both Kennedy and Johnson that it would be a
> sure win. In 1995, McNarmara completed his memoirs, In Retrospect: The
> Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. This book revived all the anger of those
> sent to Vietnam and were lucky enough to have survived, though most not
> intact. Some 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese died in this
> bloody conflict. McNamarra now says "Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We
> owe it to future generations to explain why." The like of Stiglitz and
> Krugman are now singing the same McNamara tune.