During the last couple of days, we’ve been pondering the career and views of big-government economist Joseph Stiglitz. We started out on Monday by mentioning Stiglitz’s glittering résumé. Here’s a little P.S. about that résumé: writing last year in National Review, Eliana Johnson noted that while it ran (at that point) to 56 pages, it omitted a good deal of Stiglitz’s speaking and consulting activity – even though, at $40,000 per lecture, he earned most of his income from that activity. These omissions, noted Johnson, were in direct violation of the transparency rules in effect at the Columbia Business School, where Stiglitz teaches. They also hid what any sensible observer would recognize as clear conflicts of interest. 

What kinds of omissions – and conflicts of interest – are we talking about here? Well, one of them involves Greece. Over the course of the Greek financial crisis, Stiglitz has weighed in repeatedly on the subject – consistently on the side of the Greek government. While other economists argue that Greece brought on its own economic woes by spending far more money on generous welfare benefits and the like than it could afford, confident that Germany and other rich EU members would keep making up the shortfall, Stiglitz has depicted Greece as an innocent victim and its EU partners (which eventually got sick of picking up the tab) as heartless heavies.

Germany, he charged in July 2015 at an international development financing summit in Addis Ababa, lacked “solidarity” with Greece. “Asking even more from Greece would be unconscionable,” he said. In response to Western leaders who criticized Greece for failing to collect taxes, he accused those same leaders of being hypocrites for “trying to undermine” his own efforts to institute an international tax system.

The same month, in an article for Time, Stiglitz even went so far as to compare Angela Merkel’s Germany to Hitler’s:

The U.S. was generous with Germany as we defeated it. Now, it is time for the U.S. to be generous with our friends in Greece in their time of need, as they have been crushed for the second time in a century by Germany….Greece needs unconditional humanitarian aid; it needs Americans to buy its products, take vacations there, and show a solidarity with Greece and a humanity that its European partners were not able to display.

As if that weren’t enough, Stiglitz wrote a New York Times op-ed – also in July 2015 – casting Greece as a “sacrificial lamb” victimized by what he calls the “troika” – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

What Stiglitz failed to acknowledge in these pieces – and elsewhere – is that he’s not a neutral observer of the Greek economic disaster. Far from it. From 2009 to 2011, he worked as a paid advisor to Greek prime minister George Papandreou, whom he’s described as a friend. In February 2010, while serving in that advisory position, Stiglitz actually said this about Greece: “There’s clearly no risk of default. I’m very confident about it.” Was he speaking as an honest, responsible analyst, or as a paid flunky? 

(A flunky, one might add, who was cashing checks from a government that should instead have been using that money to pay down its debts.)

More tomorrow.