‘Bond Villain communists who hate human flourishing,’ says Asness
Some prominent economists—including a Nobel laureate from Columbia University, Joseph Stiglitz, who starred in a recent “Tax the Rich” event with New York mayor Zohran Mamdani—are facing a severe backlash after publishing an article in the Guardian declaring that “‘growth’ is a doomed strategy” and calling for “public control of strategic assets” as part of a “just transition beyond growth.”
The article promoted a 138-page “Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth” that was released by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a group that includes Communist Cuba and Communist China, as well as slow-growth fading European powers such as Spain, France, and the United Kingdom.
The claims in the roadmap and the opinion article—that economic growth is bad for the environment, or that poverty can be eliminated by giving more power to the state and by confiscating more property through taxation—have been made for decades. Attempts to implement policies along those lines have proven disastrous. Yet the Mamdani administration, voters too young to remember Soviet Communism or too poorly educated to have learned about it in school, and the U.N.-Ivy League-nonprofit foundation industrial complex seem determined to give them another whirl.
The latest effort—which also includes French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 Harvard University Press book Capital in the Twenty-First Century argued for a wealth tax—is being met with derision from market participants and serious economists.
An economist at U.C. Berkeley, Jon Steinsson, commented, “I don’t know what Piketty, Stiglitz, and co. are smoking. Global poverty rates have never been lower. Progress on basic global health and wellbeing measures has been amazing over the past few decades. ‘End of the road’?!? Come again!?!”
An economist at New York University, Alberto Bisin, commented, “Stiglitz is imposing a huge negative externality on the profession – literally squandering one of the best well-deserved reputations in economics for short run punditry gains.”
“You are Bond Villain communists who hate human flourishing. Perhaps you used to be economists,” Cliff Asness posted. Asness has a doctorate in finance from the University of Chicago and his firm, AQR, managed a reported $179 billion in late 2025.
An economist at Washington State University Pullman, Christopher Clarke, wrote, “Piketty et al claim ‘the promise that economic growth would ‘lift all boats’ has not been kept.’ Yet Piketty’s own data show that for the first time in 4 centuries global inequality improved in recent history. We want more global growth, not less.”
A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has a doctorate in economics from Harvard, Stan Veuger, remarked, “If you want a sense of how nutty this is, they couldn’t get Zucman to sign on.” That was a reference to Gabriel Zucman, a U.C. Berkeley economist who has been working with Senator Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories, on a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires that would amount to a $4.4 trillion tax increase.
Stiglitz, 83, who is University Professor at Columbia, won the Nobel in economics in 2001. He has been among the group of academic economists haranguing the Israeli government over what the economists claim from the relative safety of their campuses is Israel’s “unconscionable” policies and “starvation” in Gaza. Stiglitz has also been denouncing what he calls America’s “multiple war crimes” against Iran.
In 2011 he reportedly sued his former divorce lawyer for more than $1 million in damages on the grounds that, as a Bloomberg News account put it, the lawyer “failed to file divorce papers in time to prevent his second wife from claiming part of his $300,000 Nobel Prize money.”
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