Globalisation and Its Discontents By Joseph E. Stiglitz Norton; 282 pages; $24.95. Allen Lane; £16.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

HERE is an author superbly qualified to write the definitive account of globalisation—its opportunities, its perils and the demands it places on governments. Joseph Stiglitz is an eminent theoretical economist, winner of last year's Nobel Prize. He was chairman of Bill Clinton's council of economic advisers, and chief economist at the World Bank. Yet Mr Stiglitz is no compliant insider. He left the Bank under a cloud after quarrelling with officials in the International Monetary Fund and America's Treasury. Since then he has published a string of articles questioning conventional thinking on development.

So Mr Stiglitz has the knowledge—practical and theoretical—as well as the independence of mind to produce a really outstanding book. The puzzle, then, is how he ever came to write this one.

Forget the title, for a start. This is not a book about globalisation—not considered in the round, at any rate. Mostly, it is an extended assault on the IMF. What the Fund did in Russia during the 1990s, or in East Asia during the crisis of 1997-98, is no small or unimportant matter. But this sets exceedingly narrow limits on the questions the book purports to address.

Where are the chapters on trade and growth, on trade and wages, on trade and unemployment, on global income inequality, on the digital divide, on market forces and the environment, on multinational monopoly, on intellectual property, on migration, on cultural imperialism—on any of the issues, in fact, that most animate the anti-globalist protesters and their far more numerous armchair sympathisers? The merits of globalisation do not rest on whether the Fund was right to call for higher interest rates in East Asia during its attempts to stabilise the region's economies after 1997—the issue that most excites Mr Stiglitz. In fact, these things have almost nothing to do with each other.

Suppose, however, that the book had been more accurately entitled, “The IMF and My Discontent”. How does it measure up against this more modest ambition? Not as well as it should. People interested in the subject will have to read it, certainly: Mr Stiglitz is too good an economist to ignore, and the arguments he advances on the mainly technical matters he addresses have real weight, as you would expect. Yet even as an essay on the failings of the IMF, the book has terrible flaws.

Those who prefer their reading matter to have been edited, for instance, will feel badly let down. Mr Stiglitz's prose reads like a draft dictated to a secretary whose mind was apt to wander: readers too will be drifting off a lot. Also, the narrative conveys a whining self-righteousness that is always tiresome and sometimes downright repellent. The book's dedication thanks the author's parents for teaching him to care. If only others had been taught to care, Mr Stiglitz seems to say, this book would not have been necessary.

And the problem with the knaves at the IMF and the Treasury is not just that they are heartless and incompetent. In an extraordinary paragraph, the book all but accuses Stanley Fischer, the Fund's deputy managing director during the years in question, of corruption: he inflicted needless punishment on borrowing countries, Mr Stiglitz implies, in return for a nice fat job with Citibank, whose interests that policy served. The author himself knows this is rubbish. Mr Fischer—no less eminent an economist than Mr Stiglitz, by the way—is a man of (hitherto) unquestioned integrity, admired right across the profession. With assaults such as these, Mr Stiglitz only shreds his own credibility.

The tasks that were dropped in the IMF's lap during the 1990s—sorting out the East Asian mess, helping Russia move from communism to capitalism—were enormously difficult. Mr Stiglitz often succeeds in laying bare exactly why. In explaining the economic interconnections which frustrated attempted remedies, he is at his impressive best. But the point is, setbacks were inevitable.

Mr Stiglitz appears to think otherwise. What if his advice had been followed? Often, that would have been difficult. He believes for instance that Russia should have established the rule of law before abandoning communism. No doubt—but how useful is it to be told that? It is equally fatuous to suppose that the Fund got things wrong deliberately, or out of stupidity, or because it was just too proud to heed the plainly superior mind of the author. Mr Stiglitz is a brilliant economist—and he cares, he cares. But not even he could have delivered Russia from communism to capitalism without pain.

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