The £3 Trillion War

The $3 Trillion War is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and his co-author Bilmes show underestimates the real figure by approximately six times.

Here he exposes the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) and also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global perspective, Stiglitz investigates the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. With chilling precision, he calculates what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building.

Prepare to change forever the way you think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of all wars.

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Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000. Before that he was Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently University Professor of the Columbia Business School and Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is the author of the best-selling Globalization and Its Discontents, The Roaring Nineties, and Making Globalization Work, all published by Penguin. The £3 Trillion War was co-written with Linda J. Bilmes, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University.

Misha Glenny is an award winning author and journalist who has been working in Eastern and Central Europe for 20 years. A former BBC Central Europe Correspondent, Misha is also the author of The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy; The Fall of Yugoslavia; and The Balkans: 1804-1999. He is the Founding Director of SEE Change, an NGO which developed cross-border cooperation between multi-ethnic municipalities in Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia. McMafia: Crime without Frontiers, about the the rise of the shadow economy since the fall of communism and the advent of globalization, will be published in over twenty territories beginning in New York and London in April 2008.

in association with the Hay Festival: www.hayfestival.com