Evening Reading: Reversal of Fortune

Read this, from Vanity Fair, during my evening stroll around the village. It's a few months old, but it's a fine, compelling rant by a Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E Stiglitz. Ideology proclaimed that markets were always good and government always bad. While George W. Bush has done as much as he can to ensure that government lives up to that reputation—it is the one area where he has overperformed—the fact is that key problems facing our society cannot be addressed without an effective government, whether it’s maintaining national security or protecting the environment. Our economy rests on public investments in technology, such as the Internet. While Bush’s ideology led him to underestimate the importance of government, it also led him to underestimate the limitations of markets. ..