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It wasn''t deficit reduction.

Article Excerpt
THE ROARING NINETIES BY JOSEPH E, STIGLITZ * W.W. NORTON AND COMPANY * 379 PAGES * $25.95

LIKE MANY ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS, Joseph E. Stiglitz went into government hoping to tutor as well as to serve. Unlike most, Stiglitz has significant doubts about whether markets usually work as advertised. His research in this genre won him the Nobel Prize. Stiglitz's four-year stint in the Clinton White House was marked by the tension between his own powerful views and the pressure on a high public official to be a loyal team player.

As chairman of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Stiglitz attempted to influence policy quietly from the inside, putting a brave face on policies he opposed. In his second government position, as chief economist for the World Bank, Stiglitz went public with his criticisms, and eventually was fired for his candor. Now Stiglitz is back in academia, at Columbia University, and he can tell us what he really thinks, as he does--often insightfully--in The Roaring Nineties.

He has written an important revisionist critique of the conventional view that budget balance and deregulation powered the 1990s boom. Even so, Stiglitz the critic and Stiglitz the loyalist are still somewhat at odds in this book, and he remains protective of Bill Clinton personally, blaming wrongheaded policies instead on Clinton's lieutenants.

WHEN I FIRST COVERED STIGLITZ, then CEA chairman, his briefings for reporters never suggested the devastating criticism that would burst from him later. I had been the lead reporter for a series of articles on layoffs published in The New York Times in March 1996, the year Clinton was up for re-election....