Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, born February 9, 1943, is an American economist, public policy analyst, and political activist who holds a professorship at Columbia University. He won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001. Stiglitz previously served as chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank, and was both a member and chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. He is a proponent of Georgist public finance theory and sharply criticizes laissez-faire economists—whom he labels "free-market fundamentalists"—as well as the management of globalization and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a Columbia-based think tank focused on international development. He joined Columbia’s faculty in 2001 and was named a university professor—its highest academic rank—in 2003. He also served as the founding chair of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought and chairs the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. A member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, he was appointed in 2009 by the President of the UN General Assembly to chair the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, overseeing proposals and a report on reforming global finance. He later chaired the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by French President Sarkozy, which produced the 2010 report *Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn’t add up*; he now co-chairs its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the same topic. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz served as president of the International Economic Association, organizing its triennial world congress near the Dead Sea in Jordan in June 2014.

*Time* magazine named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011. His research centers on income distribution from a Georgist viewpoint, asset risk management, corporate governance, and international trade. He has authored numerous books, including *The Road to Freedom* (2024), *People, Power, and Profits* (2019), *The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe* (2016), *The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them* (2015), *Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy* (2015), and *Creating a Learning Society* (2014). He is one of 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Stiglitz is the fifth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.

Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, to a Jewish family. His mother, Charlotte Fishman, taught at Purdue University Calumet Campus; his father, Nathaniel David Stiglitz, worked as an insurance salesman. He attended Amherst College as a National Merit Scholar, active on the debate team and serving as student government president. During his senior year, he studied at MIT, where he later pursued graduate work. In the summer of 1965, he moved to the University of Chicago to research under Hirofumi Uzawa, who had an NSF grant. He completed his PhD at MIT from 1966 to 1967, also holding an assistant professorship there. Stiglitz has said MIT’s style of economics—"simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions"—suited him well.

From 1966 to 1970, he was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, initially arriving at Fitzwilliam College as a Fulbright Scholar in 1965, then winning a Tapp Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, which shaped his understanding of Keynes and macroeconomics. He later held academic posts at Yale, Stanford, Oxford (as Drummond Professor of Political Economy), and Princeton. Since 2001, he has been a professor at Columbia, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics, and the School of International and Public Affairs, and serves as an editor of *The Economists' Voice* alongside J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin. He teaches in a double-degree program between Sciences Po Paris and École Polytechnique in Economics and Public Policy. He has chaired the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester since 2005. Though widely seen as a New Keynesian economist, at least one economics journalist argues his work defies easy categorization.

Stiglitz held several policy roles. He chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton from 1995 to 1997. At the World Bank, he served as senior vice president and chief economist from 1997 to 2000, but was fired for expressing dissent with its policies. He advised President Barack Obama but criticized the Obama administration’s financial-industry rescue plan, stating that whoever designed it was "either in the pocket of the banks or they're incompetent." In October 2008, the President of the UN General Assembly asked him to chair a commission on reforming the international monetary and financial system.