Joseph E. Stiglitz

Amartya Sen, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics, has argued forcefully that famines do not occur in societies in which there is a free press.1 It is not the lack of food in the aggregate that gives rise to famines, but the lack of access to food by the poor in famine regions. A free press exposes these problems; once exposed, the failure to act is absolutely intolerable.

“On Liberty, the Right to Know and Public Discourse: The Role of Transparency in Public Life,”
Joseph E. Stiglitz
(pdf)