Soon the world will kneel down and kiss the feet of the international banksters and the Wall Streetwalkers that pimp their insatiable greed. Feudalism revisited! And we asked for it by never searching for the truth. It won't be found at the mall,or the ball park or by staring dumbly into box where the vidiots park their minds.

"'What workers care about is if growth will be strong enough to reduce the high level of unemployment in the U.S. or Europe.'"

MORE BULLSHIT FROM ANOTHER ELITIST BULLSHIT ECONOMIST!

What workers care about is sharing the wealth in a world that cannot sustain more growth without destroying the Earth.

I HATE FUCKING ECONOMISTS.

Capitalists/Capitalism demand(s) endless growth, which in turn requires endless expansion of markets depending on endless population growth on a finite planet with finite resources. The planet is vast but finite. Resources are vast but finite. Draw your own conclusions. Far as I'm concerned it's just a matter of time. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe endless expansion is possible in a finite environment. Maybe pigs actually will someday fly.

I'm no economist, but I tend to agree with others commenting here that if we share what we already have, repair what we already have, take care of what we already have, then people can have jobs and live better.

Growth usually means more oil, more speculation, more war, more degradation of the environment. These days growth does not usually make money for the average person, but further concentrates wealth (and political power) with those who control large enterprises such as energy, agriculture and banking. Growth can be healthy or it can be lawless, like a cancer. Growth often crowds out smaller and healthier enterprises.

We need economic justice more than we need growth, per se. If we tax the wealthy at a rate commensurate with their ability to pay, rather than nickle and diming school children, college students, workers, retirees, homeowners, renters, then the majority would be much better off.

Joe

as a worker and living-world inhabitant, I wonder why economists are given Nobel prizes for ignoring large portions of each of their equations...

the natural portions, and the violent portions...

does the Nobel honor dishonesty?

According to some e-mails i get from my kooky, reactionary, "christian", right wing tea party extremist family members in Virginia, Stiglitz is belelved to be the #1 most likely candidate for being the coming "Anti-Christ" of apocalyptic prophesy.

What workers care about is having as job. They care about feeding their families. They care about their children doing better than they did hopefully. They care about their family being safe and protected.

Economist's have seldom been right in case no one noticed and Stiglitz is no different.

I think it's worth noting that Naomi Klein outlined all these austerity measures as they were practiced by turns on South Africa, South America, Poland, and Russia... until more perfected, and delivered home to the U.S.A from where (the notorious Chicago School) they were developed.

It's always about the rich devising ways to skim the cream off the top. Then what's left in the rancid barrel is endlessly analyzed... to make the division of the lesser palatable to all those taught to starve for crumbs or droplets.

JCLIENTELLE: Great post.

Austerity, during a severe downturn, is nothing less than a declaration of war on the working people of the world.

It should be treated as such.

This article is propaganda designed to scare the people into supporting the defunct "economic growth at all cost" imperative that created all the carnage in the first place. Siglitz is simply another elite operative trying old tricks to further entrench the people in slavery. But the people know better. We aren't hurting too much in this deflating economy because we're taking what we need from the elites, i.e. ownership/control of production and public policy.

I'm appalled by most of the insipidly inane far left wing bs on display here. Whether your head's in the clouds or up your ass makes little difference. When it comes to economics, pragmatism rules. Just because resources are finite is no reason to expect an end to traditional economics and capitalism. Pay attention to people like Stiglitz, Krugman, Baker, and yes, even Naomi Klein. These people know something about the world and economics.

Perhaps the drumbeat for deficit reduction but not military spending reduction is a way of going after social security-medicare.

Most of the workers I know, suffer from the delusion of the conservative, freemarket, capitalist fantasy. Many would not join a union, and there is a general fear of socialism. On another front, most of the unemployed, including me, would wish for a job, but we are stymied by no jobs. Just what I want is austerity. i have a garden, but it is not producing as well as it might have fifteen years ago. I think there is something wrong in the environment.
There are very few economists that include the environment in the economic picture, and the cost is very great. The world as we know it is changing in ways that we can see, or we can ignore, but it is changing. I don't know if the ocean can sustain itself with an increase of carbon, while the fishes are netted almost to extinction. How many oil spills will it take to marinate your seafood. It doesn't matter if you don't work and can't buy anything. Maybe the underground economy is what will save us.

Harry Truman once said, "If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they would all point different directions."

Statistically, one of them is right, and all the others more or less wrong. Bad odds all around...

Actually the right kind of growth from stimulus spending would be good for the middle and lower class and the environment. We should spend more for solar and wind energy and to help people make their homes more energy efficient. There is a new invention of super capacitor batteries with a thousand layers much more energy efficient than lithium, charges much faster and a charge last longer and the materials in it are cheaper, such as microdiamonds cheap to make. Cars with this would reduce the need for overall energy since they are more efficient reducing greenhouse gases & should be subsidized by the government. FDR created the Conservation Corp giving many young people employment in the depression and helping the National Park, do that as part of the stimulus spending. We should appropriate more money for NASA to check on global warming conditions on Earth. Birthrates in almost all of the developed world are down. Birthrates have even come down from their high levels in Latin America. It is 2.4 in Mexico which along with Nepal had the highest birthrates in the world in past decades. But birthrate for Mexican immigrants to the US is 3.2 because the US government stupidly does not provide birth control for immigrant women. Surveys show that they would rather limit their birthrate and birth control pills should be provided.

Meh...

Lot of folks here continually display a common thought trap that disparages truly rational discourse on the most important topic of modern economics. There is a big difference between living and functioning in the real world vs. working/dreaming/organizing for a better one. Stiglitz has made some of the most important contributions to economic thought of any living economist (read "Globalization and its Discontents" for a great example of when an economist is right about something) but there's no doubt that he's working within mostly capitalist doctrine. That being said, he's absolutely right about the utter ruthlessness of austerity programs and that should be recognized right now as an authentic concern for real people in the real world.

Farther out into the future, I agree with most here that we need to re-assemble institutional structures, perhaps along the lines of, say, Michael Albert's Parecon model or something similar. But right now millions of people need to eat something tomorrow, so deficit spending and strengthening safety-net programs in existing capitalist/social-democratic societies is where it's at until the world's economy turns around (who knows what that would look like or when it will happen...I don't lay any claim to that at all!)

Another way to say it is Stiglitz is focusing on immediate foreground rather than a deeper background for broad change. Let's make sure we can make these distinctions and then I think the commenting will benefit from this. Hastily dismissing folks like Stiglitz because he's not fomenting revolutionary insurrections comes off as irrational and unreasonable.

in the competitive situation of rapidly increasing operational worldwide scarcity, the winners consolidate and protect their winnings in any way possible, and the losers are left to slavery and death.

Here, courtesy of Counterpunch, is the best explanation I've read of the underlying intention and ultimate outcome of our present Great Depression. This article includes among its putrid villains the likes of Obama and the Democrats. You know the Democrats, those friends of working people everywhere.

THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

The fact remains, however, that the kleptocratic rulers in the US, EU, and other debt-burdened countries know exactly what they are doing: to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract “enough” concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labor costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries. This explains why despite new signs of further global economic contraction, the reigning governments in these countries (whether they are nominally headed by Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, Democratic, Conservative or other parties) are maintaining their coordinated abstention from expansive or stimulating fiscal policies while continuing their brutal spending cuts on health, education, wages, pensions, and the like.

This is not to say that these governments do not want to have economic growth or job-creation—they do—but that they want them on their own (Neoliberal) terms, that is, through Neoliberal policies that would create jobs that would pay wages on a par with those of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, they prefer the kind of lopsided economic growth whose fruits would be reaped mostly by the wealthy—the so-called trickle-down or supply-side economic growth. As writer/reporter Patrick O’Connor points out, “In the US, Europe and other advanced capitalist economies, the aim is permanently reducing the living standards of working people.

Very succint and great post by SaboCat below (above)
It replies well to a lot of know nothing, bone chilling, mass murdering (see below) anarchists and OBVIOUSLY white racists on this thread who are hysterically yelling for the messenger's (Stiglitz')head.

As for the "no more growth" stupidity of the old, Malthusian, libertarians on this thread, I am so tired of their racist "over population" bulshit, disguised(and badly at that) "progressive" back to the great, green Earth, I say off with your own heads. Indeed, it is slowly dawning on me that CD is largely populated by old white racists,keyboarders pretending they have compassionate, progressive views. If you tell the 1 billion starving poor that no growth and their genocide is the solution to their old white american "progressive" dreams then they will know never to believe that any "socialism" of any kind has entered the heads of the white "working class". These kind seem to be legion on CD and have no reasoning ability to make their point and are as dogmatic as Islamofascists

What the F*$k do you mean "OVER POPULATION" except for brown and black skinned people around the world?

Stigliz' comment is about Europe and white North America, where there are no population pressures. So why is killing off 1 billion brown and black people THE soltion to every goddamn, bad economic mangement crisis is Europe and America your first thought?

Do you MFs even know the first thing about COUNTING? YOU DON'T, and you want to "share wealth"? The BIGGEST consumers are your white, obese Americans who consume 25 TIMES per PERSON more than the average person in the Brown-Black world, and most likely 50 TIMES MORE than the dying -of -starvation poor person, mostly children, you heartless pigs, in the Third world. THUS 50 poor people of brown-black-yellow skins have to die to keep one F#$%!!g white, obese Amurkan alive. In fact even the Europeans, who are white seem to get by well in life without consuming as much food as the Amurkan.

So guess whom I would sacrifice to a world genocidal slaughterhouse that you continuously drool about first - - a starving brown/black/yellow skin-and-bones person, or fat, white pig, especially old and shit-filled as many of the MF posters here are who keep on yelling the "over population" mantra, and are tolerated by the other "progressive" posters here?