The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade

With his best-selling Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz showed how a misplaced faith in free-market ideology led to many of the recent problems suffered by the developing nations. Here he turns the same light on the United States. The Roaring Nineties offers not only an insider's illuminating view of policymaking but also a compelling case that even the Clinton administration was too closely tied to the financial community—that along with enormous economic success in the nineties came the seeds of the destruction visited on the economy at the end of the decade. This groundbreaking work by the Nobel Prize-winning economist argues that much of what we understood about the 1990s' prosperity is wrong, that the theories that have been used to guide world leaders and anchor key business decisions were fundamentally outdated. Yes, jobs were created, technology prospered, inflation fell, and poverty was reduced. But at the same time the foundation was laid for the economic problems we face today. Trapped in a near-ideological commitment to free markets, policymakers permitted accounting standards to slip, carried deregulation further than they should have, and pandered to corporate greed. These chickens have now come home to roost. The paperback includes a new introduction that reviews the continued failure of the Bush administration's policies, which have taken a bad situation and made it worse.

About the Author :
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the best-selling author of The Price of Inequality, Freefall, and Globalization and Its Discontents. He is a columnist for the New York Times and Project Syndicate and has written for Vanity Fair, Politico, The Atlantic, and Harper's. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Review :
"An excellent primer." -- Booklist "Joe Stiglitz is the economist I want guarding my back if a bloody firefight is about to break out with free-market fundamentalists." -- John Leonard - Salon.com "Solidly rooted in [Stiglitz's] path-breaking work on the economics of risk and information." -- Boston Globe "In this groundbreaking work, Stiglitz argues that much of what we understood about '90s prosperity is wrong, that the theories are outdated." -- Express News "A powerfully argued brief...about the lessons to be gleaned from the new-economy bubble." -- Harvard Business Review "Stiglitz brings unsurpassed expertise and an insider's perspective to the subject of corporate greed." -- San Francisco Chronicle