My friend Bob was kind enough to invite me to Town Hall last night to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak about the recent economic meltdown – or, as he puts it in his new book, the “freefall”. It was my first visit to Town Hall and I was really impressed with the venue – it’s rolling in old-school neo-classical accents and in fact started out life in the 1920’s as a Christian Science church. It’s got pews and is broad and open and airy. The crowd appeared to be a mixture of old liberal Seattle money, younger liberal bourgeois intellectuals, and even younger starry-eyed hyper-liberal students. Extra bonus points if you correctly pick which category I fall into.
So – about the talk. Stiglitz spoke for about 50 minutes on who and what was responsible for the 2008-2009 economic decline and what we can do about it. He pulled very few punches, giving out sharp raps to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street, the anti-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill, free-market fundamentalists, and even Robert Rubin. Economics is not my forte, but I gather he’s a sort of a contrarian sort, the smart-as-hell guy who sits outside the clubhouse and doesn’t let relationships or tradition get in the way of facts and evidence. He’s sort of charming in a professorial way, not a fire-breather by any means, and talked simply but not patronizingly about a very complicated set of subjects.
What to make of it? I came away thinking about a few things: corporate governance; what are known as the “agency problems”; the role of the old-boys’ network in ignoring and/or fomenting the mess we got ourselves in; and his obvious distaste for the blindly obedient invisible-hand adherents.
Interestingly, he didn’t once talk about individual decisions that people made to take on more debt than they could afford; matching, I suspect, both his personal views as well as that of most of the audience. I’m not sure that a fully-fleshed out argument can accurately leave out personal agency as a contributing factor to the mess. I mean, someone can offer me free heroin, but I still have to inject it.
I also found out last night that Dr. Stiglitz has a family connection with someone whom I used to work with and still admire very much; meaning that I’ll be following his talks and writings more closely than otherwise. Context and personal relationships still matter in this day and age of stateless interwebs.

