THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
W.W. Norton
Publication Date: March 2008
Contact: Angela Hayes, 212-446-5104

Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms--the true cost conservatively clocking in at $3 trillion—and counting—rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans—for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer’s money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ of Columbia University is the author of Making Globalization Work and Globalization and Its Discontents. LINDA J. BILMES, a professor of public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is a former assistant secretary for management and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce.