Joseph Stiglitz - Life and Career

Life and Career

Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, to Jewish parents, Charlotte (née Fishman) and Nathaniel D. Stiglitz. From 1960 to 1963, he studied at Amherst College, where he was a highly active member of the debate team and president of the student government. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his fourth year as an undergraduate, where he later pursued graduate work. His undergraduate degree was awarded from Amherst College. From 1965 to 1966, he moved to the University of Chicago to do research under Hirofumi Uzawa who had received an NSF grant. He studied for his PhD from MIT from 1966 to 1967, during which time he also held an MIT assistant professorship. Stiglitz stated that the particular style of MIT economics suited him well - simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions. From 1966 to 1970 he was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge: he arrived at Fitzwilliam House as a Fulbright Scholar in 1965 and then won a Tapp Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. In subsequent years, he held academic positions at Yale, Stanford, Duke, Oxford, and Princeton. Stiglitz is now a professor at Columbia University, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and is editor of The Economists' Voice journal with J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin. He also gives classes for 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. Stiglitz is a New-Keynesian economist.

In addition to making numerous influential contributions to microeconomics, Stiglitz has played a number of policy roles. He served in the Clinton administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). At the World Bank, he served as senior vice-president and chief economist (1997 – 2000), in the time when unprecedented protest against international economic organizations started, most prominently with the Seattle WTO meeting of 1999. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, a Spanish think tank.

Stiglitz has advised American president Barack Obama, but has also been sharply critical of the Obama Administration's financial-industry rescue plan. Stiglitz said that whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is "either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent."

In October 2008 he was asked by the President of the United Nations General Assembly to chair a commission drafting a report on the reasons for and solutions to the financial crisis. In response, the commission produced the Stiglitz Report.

On July 25, 2011, Stiglitz participated to the "I Foro Social del 15M" organized in Madrid (Spain) expressing his support to the 2011 Spanish protests.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers.