Joseph E Stiglitz

It's old news that large segments of society have become deeply unhappy with what they see as “the establishment”, especially the political class. The “Yellow Vest” protests in France, triggered by President Emmanuel Macron's move to hike fuel taxes in the name of combating climate change, are but the latest example of the scale of this alienation.

Just under 10 years ago, the International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress issued its report “Mismeasuring Our Lives

All eyes are on the United States as November's Congressional elections approach. The outcome will answer many alarming questions raised two years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidential election.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, some economists argued that the United States, and perhaps the global economy, was suffering from “secular stagnation,”

What was at first a trade skirmish—with US President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum—appears to be quickly morphing into a full-scale trade war with China.

The trade skirmish between the United States and China on steel, aluminium, and other goods is a product of US President Donald Trump's scorn for multilateral trade arrangements and the World Trade Organization, an institution that was created to adjudicate trade disputes.

In 1967, riots erupted in cities throughout the United States, from Newark, New Jersey, to Detroit and Minneapolis in the Midwest—all two years after the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles exploded in violence. In response, President Lyndon B Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes and propose measures to address them.

I have been attending the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, where the so-called global elite convenes to discuss the world's problems, since 1995.

Never has a piece of legislation labelled as both a tax cut and a reform been received with as much disapproval and derision as the bill passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump just before Christmas.

A year ago, I predicted that the most distinctive aspect of 2017 would be uncertainty, fueled by, among other things, Donald Trump's election as president in the United States and the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union.

Fifteen years ago, I published Globalization and Its Discontents, a book that sought to explain why there was so much dissatisfaction with globalisation within the developing countries.

One of the important powers of any US president is to appoint members and heads of the many agencies that are responsible for implementing the country's laws and regulations and, in many cases, governing the economy.

Although America's right-wing plutocrats may disagree about how to rank the country's major problems—for example, inequality, slow growth, low productivity, opioid addiction, poor schools, and deteriorating infrastructure—the solution is always the same: lower taxes and deregulation, to “incentivise” investors and “free up” the economy.

Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.

Donald Trump has thrown a hand grenade into the global economic architecture that was so painstakingly constructed in the years

The likely victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election has elicited a global sigh of relief.

Today, a quarter-century after the Cold War's end, the West and Russia are again at odds. This time, though, at least on one side, the

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies — whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico — are stronger. But Trump's approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Donald Trump grasped the spirit of the time: things weren't going well, and many voters wanted change. Now they will get it: there will be no business as usual. But seldom has there been more uncertainty. Which policies Trump will pursue remains unknown, to say nothing of which will succeed or what the consequences will be.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. I would hate to say “I told you so,”