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Globalization and Its Discontents
Stiglitz's 2002 indictment of IMF structural-adjustment policies — the book that established him as the foremost internal critic of institutions he had served and whose central argument, that technocratic policy without democratic legitimacy produces concentrated gains and distributed suffering, transfers directly to the AI governance discourse.
Globalization and Its Discontents is the book that broke Stiglitz from the institutional mainstream. Written after his tenure as chief economist at the World Bank (1997–2000), where he observed the consequences of IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs firsthand, the book indicts the international financial institutions for applying one-size-fits-all market-liberalization policies to developing economies without democratic input from the populations that bore the costs. The central analytical move — that markets with severe information asymmetry and concentrated power produce outcomes that are neither efficient nor equitable, and that technocratic governance without democratic legitimacy amplifies rather than corrects the distortions — transfers with uncomfortable precision to the AI governance discourse, where a similar pattern of technocratic policy-making without broad democratic input is producing similar distributional consequences.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's core empirical content is a detailed reconstruction of the 1997 Asian financial crisis,