Nobel-prize winning economist Stiglitz grabbed headlines this week after his speech sponsored by the ESRI in which he called for economic sanctions against the United States for its failure to sign up to the carbon-reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol to try and arrest climate change. The sheer, erm, improbability of that outcome might have been a way of making the overarching point he makes in this book - a post-Iraq War update of his 2002 Globalisation and its Discontents.

Stiglitz argues that the global trade system, imperiled since the collapse of the Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks, is a rigged game that keeps less developed countries trapped in poverty while enriching the US and Europe.

We think Stiglitz gives short shrift to globalisation's bene"ts to the hundreds of millions of the formerly poor in China and India, and doesn't pay enough attention to the fact that globalisation's discontents on the streets of Genoa and Seattle are whiny middle class kids who represent themselves. But then again, we don't have a Nobel prize on our mantle.