Four years after his global best-seller, Joseph Stiglitz now brings the story up to the present, examining how change has occurred even more rapidly since then, proposing solutions and looking into the future. Here he puts forward radical new ways of dealing with the crippling indebtedness of developing countries, a new system of global reserves to overcome international financial instability, and an economically incentivised framework for dealing with energy pollutions which create global warming and which threaten us on a planetary scale. He argues convincingly for the reform of global institutions such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank to make them truly capable of responding to the problems of our age and shows why treating developing countries more fairly is not only morally right, but because it increases global public goods, is ultimately to the advantage of the developed world too. Above all, Stiglitz argues we need to change the way we think. Now more than ever before, globalization is bringing the countries and the peoples of the world into one interdependent community, bringing with it a need to think and act globally. This trenchant, intellectually powerful and inspiring book is a step in the process.