Jagdish Bhagwati on "Capitalism's Petty Detractors"

Writing in the journal World Affairs, the great Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati criticizes Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz for his take on the current economic crisis:

Stiglitz made a much-cited claim that the current crisis was for capitalism (and markets) the equivalent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Now, we know that all analogies are imperfect, but this one is particularly dicey. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, we saw the bankruptcy of both authoritarian politics and an economics of extensive, almost universal, ownership of the means of production and central planning. We saw a wasteland. When Wall Street and Main Street were shaken by crisis, however, we witnessed merely a pause in prosperity, not a devastation of it.

Read the rest here. Reason on Bhagwati's In Defense of Globazilation here and his Free Trade Today here.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)