An Ivory Tower Embrace of Views in the Streets

For several years now, a fractious debate about the role of the big financial institutions in the globalized economy has encircled the world's policy makers, moving from the initial grumblings of the often-unheeded developing world through the street protests of Seattle and elsewhere and on to a much broader agenda. With "Globalization and Its Discontents" (W. W. Norton, $24.95), Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economic science in 2001, has taken the discussion a step further. He shows just how much the protesters' misgivings about and outright hostility toward some of those institutions have moved from the fringes into influential, mainstream thinking.