Joseph Stiglitz has written a new book about the Euro. Here’s an interview in the New York Times.

It is difficult to overstate the economic trauma Europe has suffered in recent years — veritable depressions in Greece and Spain, alarming levels of unemployment across much of the continent. You place much of the blame on the euro. What happened?

The euro was an attempt to advance the economic integration of Europe by having the countries of the eurozone share a common currency. They looked across the Atlantic and they said: “The United States, big economy, very successful, single currency. We should imitate.”

But they didn’t have the political integration. They didn’t have the conditions that would make a single currency work. The creation of the euro is the single most important explanation for the extraordinarily poor performance of the eurozone economies since the crisis of 2008…

You conclude that the best-case scenario from here is to reform and save the euro. But absent that, you contend that it is better to just scrap it as a failed experiment. What needs to happen to make the euro viable?

A banking union with deposit insurance. Something like a euro bond. An E.C.B. that doesn’t just focus on inflation — you want it to focus on employment. A tax policy that deals with the inequalities. And you have to get rid of limits on government deficits.

If I understand this correctly, he is suggesting that the problem is that the Euro is not issued by a true central bank, but instead by individual countries with varying levels of wealth and power.

I was debating with a friend the other day about whether the average citizen is capable of understanding current events and issues well enough to support good policies. I think the average human being certainly has the raw intelligence to do so, but even the well educated mostly have not been provided with the mental tools they would need to understand the complexity of the world around us. Central banking is a good example of something an intelligent human being is capable of understanding, but almost none do. I never learned anything about it in elementary or high school. I learned some basic concepts about the money supply and interest rates in college economics courses, but I didn’t really get it the first time around. Part of it is that algebraic equations are just not the right way to introduce big picture concepts to most people including me (and I was doing just fine in engineering school at the time). Simulations or even physical models would work better to gain an intuitive understanding, backed up by symbolic algebra and calculus later.

I’m not really suggesting that the answer is to turn over public policy to the economists. They understand the theory behind the central banking system, sure, but they may neglect the larger social and environmental context it is embedded in, may neglect to consider complex, dynamic, nonlinear behavior that does not fit neatly into their elegant steady-state algebraic theories, and are often terrible at communication with decision makers and the public. We need experts and respect for experts, but we also need a broad base of intuitive understanding of systems among politicians, bureaucrats, and the public. It could be done.