- Person
- Joseph Stiglitz
- Lived
- b. 1943
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Joseph Stiglitz was born in 1943 in Gary, Indiana, then a major steel town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. He went to public schools in a city that, like most American cities of the time, was racially segregated, though children from all walks of life studied together. He later wrote that the poverty, discrimination and episodic unemployment he saw there could not fail to strike an inquiring youngster, and he wanted to know why they existed and what could be done about them. He grew up in a family where political questions were debated intensely.
In 1960 he arrived at Amherst College in Massachusetts, then a men's college of about 1,000 students, on a full scholarship. He served on the student council in his first two years and in his junior year was elected its president. As he later wrote, he believed that anyone who attains a position of power should see it as an opportunity for social change. He launched a campaign to abolish the college's fraternities, which he saw as socially divisive. It was unpopular and faced a recall attempt, but it eventually succeeded.
Like many of his generation, Stiglitz was concerned about segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights, and impatient with leaders, President Kennedy among them, who took a cautious approach. He took part in the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I have a dream' speech, which he called an indelible memory. He also organised an exchange programme with a small African-American college in the South, believing it was important for Amherst students to understand, as far as they could, what their peers were confronting.
He wrote that these were years when civil rights activists from the North were being killed, but in their enthusiasm for doing what was right, the risks never crossed their minds. The experience, he said, reinforced a lifelong distrust of authorities that tolerate injustice.
The same concerns shaped his work as an economist. Growing up in Gary, he later explained, made him doubt theories claiming that competitive markets would automatically eliminate discrimination, because he knew from experience that discrimination persisted. His research on how markets fail, and his later books on inequality, carried forward the commitment to fairness that first showed itself on the Mall in Washington.
Why it matters
Stiglitz’s student activism reflected a lifelong commitment to fighting discrimination and inequality, themes that ran through his later economics.
About Joseph Stiglitz
Nobel economist from Gary, Indiana, who showed how imperfect information distorts markets, led the World Bank’s research and became a leading critic of inequality.
More about Joseph Stiglitz
- Joseph Stiglitz named the Henry George theoremJoseph Stiglitz showed that the ideal supply of local public goods can be funded entirely by taxing the land rents those goods create, calling it the Henry George theorem.
- Joseph Stiglitz won a Nobel for the economics of informationJoseph Stiglitz shared the 2001 Nobel economics prize for showing how markets work when one side knows more than the other, including how insurers screen customers.
- Joseph Stiglitz explained why unemployment persistsIn 1984 Carl Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz published a model showing how employers’ difficulty monitoring workers can keep wages high and leave some people unemployed.
- Joseph Stiglitz led a commission on measuring beyond GDPIn 2008 Joseph Stiglitz chaired the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, whose 2009 report argued that GDP alone does not measure well-being.
- Joseph Stiglitz founded a think tank on developmentIn 2000 Joseph Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, and since 2005 he has chaired Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute.
Sources
- Joseph E. Stiglitz: Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.