COMMENTARY
Moderation provides key to happiness
- Published: 2 Jan 2013 at 00.00
- Newspaper section: News
On June 6 of last year, I wrote in this column that the Great Recession starting in 2008 was bad for most people except those who wrote about it. Dozens of books have been published and I mentioned three that had interested me in particular _ two by Joseph Stiglitz and one by Jeffrey Sachs. These books ask more fundamental questions than most about the causes of the current economic problems.
In Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Stiglitz attributes the Great Recession and lingering economic problems to what he calls a moral deficit, which I believe was also the main cause of the 1997 financial crisis in Thailand.
He, however, did not provide detailed proposals as to what to do about it, neither in that book nor in the subsequent one entitled, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. In this book, he warns about inequality which tends to lead to instability which creates more inequality which leads to more instability _ a vicious circle that seems to have engulfed us.
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