Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia, is embarrassed for the field of economics.
In his latest book that was published last month, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Stiglitz writes that economists “failed in their basic tasks of prediction and forecasting” leading up to the current economic crisis. Stiglitz thinks the problem is that economists are “blinded by faith in free markets,” an argument that calls into question the basic social task of economics.
