One of the economics profession?s foremost statists, Joseph Stiglitz, complains in a new book that President Obama hasn?t done enough to trash capitalism.
At least that?s the sense you?ll get from a review in Business Week:
The message: We have a once-in-a-generation chance to design “a more efficient and a more stable economy” by readjusting the balance between markets and government. Obama has so far squandered this opportunity, Stiglitz says.
The President did engender a sense of hope, he writes. “And yet, in a more fundamental sense, ‘no drama’ Obama was conservative,” observes Stiglitz. “He didn’t offer an alternative vision of capitalism.” Obama chose instead to “muddle through”?”to take a big gamble by largely staying the course that President Bush had laid out.”
If Stiglitz?s ideas offer more evidence of the dubious nature of the Nobel Prize in economics, at least the prize has honored more worthy thinkers.