The point I was trying to make in the original Washington consensus was not that Friedman, Hayek, Thatcher, and Reagan were really right and Stiglitz and his pals are really wrong. As a matter of fact I find it easy to name specific issues on which I differ sharply from Friedman et al—the impropriety of governmental attempts to influence income distribution, constant growth of some concept of the money supply, bipolar exchange rate regimes, etc. In contrast, there are rather few concrete issues on which I disagree with Stiglitz—only, to the best of my knowledge, his willingness to tolerate high inflation and his hostility to inflation targeting. The point I sought to make was, rather, that there was now a wide enough measure of agreement on certain basic issues and how to achieve them as to remove these topics from the need for active debate. We could all agree on the need for macroeconomic stability, integrating into the world economy, and using the market. It seems that I was wrong in thinking that this is widely held, but it was the belief that in the post-Berlin Wall age these were commonly shared values that motivated what I called the Washington consensus.

In fact, it seems to me that these ideas are overwhelmingly held by economists. To take a recent example, Dani Rodrik (who is not noted for his enthusiastic espousal of the Washington consensus) wrote

…successful economies...all engage in the global economy, maintain macroeconomic stability, stimulate saving and investment, provide market-oriented incentives, and are reasonably well governed.