Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reveals true cost of war during Kellogg visit

Government accounting flaws, deception hide grim numbers associated with Iraq conflict, claims former World Bank economist

By Matt Golosinski

April 21, 2008 - The United States is bleeding money. That’s the alarm sounded by Joseph Stiglitz in his new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, a narrative that details what he and co-author Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor of public finance, say are the staggering hidden costs of America’s current Iraq War. He brought his discussion to the Kellogg School on April 18, speaking to a capacity audience from Kellogg and the larger Northwestern University and Evanston communities.

To hear the former World Bank chief economist and senior vice president detail the economic circumstances associated with the conflict, now in its fifth year and costing U.S. taxpayers $12 billion each month, is to enter a realm that rivals the bleak, madcap world conjured by Joseph Heller’s classic satire Catch-22. For Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Prize winner, the tragedy of war is compounded by significant — and deliberate, he contends — flaws in how the Bush Administration has accounted for the war’s expenses.