Imagining that a large number of very different economies could be squeezed into a single poorly constructed currency was one fatal conceit. Imagining that the story of what happened next could be squeezed into one rigid “narrative” was another — but that’s what economist Joseph Stiglitz has done in The Euro, a badly flawed book about a disastrous idea.
Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and a Columbia professor, has been crusading for years now against the wickedness of “neoliberalism,” a term that, like “late capitalism,” says more about the person using it than about what it purports to describe. Check out the titles of some of his more recent books: “The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them,” “The Price of Inequality,” “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.” The Euro is the latest installment in a long leftist tirade.
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