Joseph Stiglitz

Who Is Joseph Stiglitz?

Joseph Stiglitz is an American New Keynesian economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his research on information asymmetry. During the Clinton administration, Stiglitz was the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, (CEA.) He is also a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, notably fired for offering a dissenting view about World Bank policy during the 1999 Seattle WTO riots.

Understanding Joseph Stiglitz

As a younger man, Stiglitz was a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award given to economists under forty who have made substantial contributions to the field of the economic sciences in the United States. A notorious critic of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Stiglitz has the background to back up his views in his many positions in global economic circles, as well as the many articles and books he has written about his experiences with international economic issues.

Born in Indiana in 1943 to an insurance salesman and a schoolteacher, Joseph Stiglitz attended Amherst College in Massachusetts and graduated in 1964. As a senior, he spent a summer studying at MIT, where he would later pursue his graduate work and serve as an assistant professor. In 1965, he became a research fellow and went to the University of Cambridge as a Fulbright scholar. From 1966–1970, he studied at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge and thereafter held academic professorships at Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, before settling into Columbia University in the year 2000. Three years later, in 2003, Stiglitz was awarded the title of “university professor,” Columbia’s highest tenured position, and Stiglitz now teaches and lectures at Columbia but devotes much of his time towards international economics issues.

Stiglitz won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979 for his work on information asymmetry, risk aversion, and imperfectly competitive markets. In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of information asymmetry, including the use of screening by insurance companies to sort customers by type in order to manage risk. He shared the award with George Akerlof and Michael Spence.

In 2009, Stiglitz was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, and in that same year he was named the chair of U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System by the president of the United Nations. In 2011, Time magazine named Stiglitz as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and in that same year, he also became the president of the International Economic Association.

Stiglitz has written and co-authored an innumerable number of academic papers and scholastic books, as well as some non-academic writings. The latest of these are: Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being in 2019 and Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity, in 2020.

Research

Stiglitz’ list of honors, awards, and achievements is staggering, but as a New Keynesian economist, the arc of his writings and teachings focus on microeconomic phenomena that can provide a basis for some of the macroeconomic theories developed by Keynesian economics. The implications of his research and the content of his popular writing talk about how government regulation of financial and corporate objectives is essential to a free, fair, and prosperous society.