The globalisation debate is typically seen as a clash of opposites: between the haves and the have-nots; the economic policy-making elite versus the rioters in Seattle and Geneva; and exploited developing nations pitted against the rapacious first world.
Joseph Stiglitz bridges these divides. Formerly Bill Clinton's chief economic adviser and the chief economist of the World Bank, he comes from the heart of the Washington financial establishment. Yet he is a hero to stone-flinging anti-globalisers and a scourge of his former colleagues in the corridors of power.
Stiglitz is no anti-capitalist red-ragger. He believes in global commerce, but opposes the dogma that markets can create prosperity without robust public institutions. He is an academic economist who writes in an accessible style, with authority born of policy-making experience and venerable academic credentials. Now a professor at New York's Columbia University, he has previously held posts at Yale, Oxford, Stanford and Princeton.
In 2001, Stiglitz shared the Nobel Prize for Economics. The award was widely seen as overdue recognition of Stiglitz's pioneering work on 'information economics'; he argues that the market is beset with asymmetrical and imperfect information that impedes economic growth - flaws he envisages the state remedying.
Stiglitz, 65, says he doesn't see his academic career as separate from his coal-face work. 'Much of what I did at the World Bank concerned the appropriate balance between the market and the state. That grew out of my work on imperfect information,' he says. In his three years at the bank he maintained an academic's refusal to compromise his ideas, finally resigning under pressure in 2000. 'They said I could stay but that I wouldn't be able to talk freely. When I went to the bank that was my one condition. I said: 'I'm not a spokesperson. I'm not a press person.''
From his experiences came Globalisation and Its Discontents (2002), a withering assault on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that sold more than a million copies and spawned a sequel, Making Globalisation Work (2006). Infuriating his erstwhile associates, Stiglitz argued that the IMF devastates developing economies with its one-size-fits-all deregulation regime. 'If I'd been proven wrong, I would have been forgiven. But to have pointed out the flaws - in the strategy, for instance, in addressing the crisis in East Asia, and the way they were mismanaging the transition of Russia and other countries to market economies - was unforgiveable.'
The IMF aired its grievances during a debate with Stiglitz in 2002. Both parties agreed to restrict the discussion to substantive issues and avoid ad hominem attacks, but the fund went for Stiglitz's jugular. After insisting the discussion be off the record, the IMF's chief economist, Ken Rogoff, immediately sent his remarks to the press as an open letter to Stiglitz. 'Having seen the underhanded ways they operate in developing countries I should have expected that kind of behaviour, but I wasn't prepared for the extent of it,' Stiglitz says. 'Everybody was scandalised.'