I'm profiled... [feedly]

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I'm profiled...
// *Dani Rodrik's* weblog

by the IMF, in their magazine Finance & Development. Here is the link. The piece is written by the IMF's Prakash Loungani, who has gone back and fished out vignettes that even I had forgotten. Here is the opening:

The triumph of markets over the state appeared almost complete in the early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall had discredited the role of the state in commanding the economic and political life of citizens. The political scientist Frank Fukuyama proclaimed in 1992 that the spread of democracy and capitalism around the globe would henceforth make history somewhat "boring." Among economists, markets—already held in fairly high regard—gained further esteem. Prominent left-leaning economists like Larry Summers admitted to a "grudging admiration" for such champions of the global spread of free markets as Milton Friedman.

But Harvard economist Dani Rodrik refused to join the party. Instead, he warned that globalization—the process of economic integration of nations through trade and finance—may have gone too far. In a 1997 monograph, he said there was a "yawning gap" between the rosy view of globalization held by economists and "the gut instincts of many laypeople" to resist it. In the United States, he noted, "a prominent Republican," Pat Buchanan, had just run "a vigorous campaign for the presidency on a plank of economic nationalism, promising to erect trade barriers and tougher restrictions on immigration" (themes pushed two decades later by Republican Donald Trump in his campaign for the 2016 presidential nomination).

Rodrik's warnings that the benefits of free trade were more apparent to economists than to others were prescient. His skepticism about the benefits of unfettered flows of capital across national boundaries is now conventional wisdom. His successful attack on the so-called Washington Consensus of policies to generate economic growth has made governments and international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank admit that there are many policy recipes that can generate growth. That the phrase "one size does not fit all" has become a cliché is due in no small part to the influence of Rodrik's work. "We didn't understand how right he was," says David Wessel, a former Wall Street Journal economics writer now at the Brookings Institution's Hutchins Center.

Loungani also has a separate article in the same issue titled "Neoliberalism" Oversold?" (co-authored with Jonathan Ostry and David Furceri).

A lengthy profile of me and a critique of financial globalization in the same issue of the IMF's flagship magazine? What is the world coming to?

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