MASTER OF DISASter.("Globalization and Its Discontents")

In 1998, Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia professor who shared last year's Nobel Prize in Economics, visited a village in rural Morocco where aid workers had been encouraging local women to raise chickens. At the time, Stiglitz was the chief economist of the World Bank, the Washington-based lending agency, which was supporting the project. It had started out well. The Moroccan government supplied the villagers with as many newly hatched chicks as they needed. But at some point, Stiglitz says, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank's sister organization, told the Moroccan government to leave the task of distributing chicks to private enterprise. A for-profit firm agreed ...