Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University, wrote the above think-piece in Foreign Policy on 28 April.
Echoing his earlier seminal works Globalization and Its Discontents (2003) and Making Globalization Work (2007), Stiglitz laments the worsening breakdown of equitable governance, both nationally and globally.
Much-touted neo-liberalism has not succeeded to lift all boats within most nations and globally. Unbridled "free economy" often serves to give "total liberty to the wolves and death to the lambs".
He cites examples including the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Covid "vaccine apartheid" prizing Big Pharma fortunes over millions of lives in poor countries, and massive subsidies to enterprises under the "CHIPS and Science Act", begging questions of "free market" double standards.
Globally, the Global South is being marginalized for lack of a fair "world government" enforcing the so-called "rule-based world order", reminiscent of famed Greek philosopher Thucydides' quote "The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must."
To win hearts and minds in a "new Cold War" agaisnt China, Stiglitz suggests that the United States should "abandon the corporate-driven rules-based system and work instead to create a set of at least basic rules that would reflect common interests."
The "corporate-driven system" is shorthand for the deeply-entrenched "military-industrial-financial-techological-media"complex that has long taken root since former US President Eisehower's parting shot in1961. See New Yorker famed investigative journalist and author Jane Mayer's bestseller Dark Mioney (2017). The hard-wired elite "corporate-driven" DNA is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Unless the United States and other countries start to embrace a more equitable "alternative world order" including reform of the United Nations Security Council, the law of the jungle in geopolitics, albeit subtly nuanced or camouflaged, is likely to continue, at a time when America can no long call all the shots.
