Speaker

Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz

Nobel laureate economist (2001, shared with George Akerlof and Michael Spence, for work on markets with asymmetric information); University Professor at Columbia University and former chief economist of the World Bank. Best known for founding, alongside Akerlof and Spence, the economics of information — the study of how markets behave once perfect, freely available information is no longer assumed — and for a five-decade career applying that lens to sharecropping contracts, labour markets, credit markets, and financial crises.

Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, studied at Amherst College and MIT, was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge (tutored briefly by Joan Robinson, then by Frank Hahn), and held posts at Yale, Oxford, Princeton, Boston University, and Columbia. He spent roughly seven years in Washington, DC, chairing the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton and serving as chief economist of the World Bank. He has written prolifically for a general audience, including Globalization and Its Discontents, The Price of Inequality (2012), The Great Divide, People, Power, and Profits, and, most recently, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024).

Core positions

  • Real markets are pervasively shaped by imperfect and asymmetric information, not by the perfect-information assumptions of standard theory. Across sharecropping contracts, efficiency wages, credit rationing, and the impossibility of informationally efficient markets, Stiglitz reads apparently puzzling institutions and outcomes as rational responses to costly, unevenly held information.
  • Inequality is a central, not peripheral, economic problem. Shaped in part by growing up in de-industrialising Gary, Indiana, Stiglitz has written inequality as a throughline of his career since his doctoral thesis, arguing it drives — rather than merely accompanies — many of the divides in contemporary society.
  • Freedom is relational: one person’s or one country’s exercise of freedom can constrain another’s. The organising argument of The Road to Freedom — applied to zoning and unrestricted building, to climate change, and to strategic trade policy alike — treats freedom as an opportunity set that can be expanded for one party only by imposing an externality on another.
  • The 2008 financial crisis was a failure of credit allocation, not an excess of credit. Stiglitz argues regulators should treat a rapid surge of credit into a single sector as an early-warning sign, and attributes 2008 to inadequately diligenced and sometimes fraudulently characterised mortgage lending rather than to the sheer volume of credit extended.
  • Development economics should now lean into the falling cost of renewable energy, not away from climate policy. He argues the roughly 90 percent fall in renewable-energy costs over the past 15 years makes decentralised green projects a genuine growth opportunity for developing economies, not a constraint imposed by rich-country concerns.

In the wiki