送交者: mangolasi 于 2006-1-10, 13:01:29:

Link of the review:http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101fareviewessay84612/joseph-e-stiglitz/the-ethical-economist.html

This review by Joseph Stiglitz reads much better than DeLong's (despite all my admiration towards Prof. DeLong), simply because an economist with heavier technical inclination will feel more at home with his arguments. Because he is more careful, treating problems as complicated one, as they actually are (like he said, Friedman's treatment is of great merit for being nuanced, but not as nuanced as he wants).

Stiglitz gave out one example against growth-only mentality, which I also stress quite often: extrenality of the green-house gas emission. It is very likely that the price of growth in US or China must be paid by a peasant in, say, Ethiopia, because the effect of green house gas emission to global warming (hence something more worrying than poor islands, the failure of crops dued to strange weather--not neccessarily warmer, due to weaker ocean currents) is not directly causual but statistical (hence you can not find the culprit responsible for that, but there must be some), and we don't have an institution ensuring good global cooperation.

Another argument is that higher growth doesn't really brings better social welfare, with US as an example. However, just one technical note on his application of John Rawls' idea of justice into welfare comparision: median income would be more informative than mean income, but far from sufficient. You need the whole distributions, and check about the stochastic dominance of them.

I should stop here because writing review on review is a bit crazy (especially before I read the original book). But my feeling now is that Stiglitz's review is not tightly targetting Friedman's book. Rather, he use it as a starting point to state his own ideas. Indeed, the review is more like a political essay plus economic general reading than a pure book review. Never mind, the abudance of these kind of reviews is precisely the reason why I love NYRB.