American economist, Nobel laureate (2001), University Professor at Columbia, and one of the most consequential public economists of his generation. Stiglitz's Nobel — shared with George Akerlof and Michael Spence — recognized the body of work, beginning in the 1970s, that established the economics of information asymmetries: the systematic study of what happens when buyers and sellers, employers and workers, insurers and insured, lenders and borrowers do not have access to the same information about the goods, risks, or efforts they are transacting over. The result was a sustained demonstration that the standard competitive-equilibrium results of mainstream microeconomics — efficient allocation, market-clearing prices, the irrelevance of distribution to efficiency — break down once realistic information conditions are admitted, and that markets so characterized are pervasive rather than exceptional. The implication is that the case for laissez-faire policy, which depended on the standard results, is much narrower than the postwar profession had typically claimed.
Stiglitz served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton (1995–97) and then as chief economist of the World Bank (1997–2000), a posting from which he resigned publicly over what he saw as the destructive effects of IMF austerity programs on developing economies during the Asian financial crisis. Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), drawn from that experience, became one of the most influential critiques of the Washington Consensus by an insider of comparable institutional standing. The Price of Inequality (2012) and People, Power, and Profits (2019) extended the argument to American economic policy, documenting how rising inequality is the outcome of policy choices — tax structure, financial deregulation, the weakening of labor — rather than a natural consequence of technology or globalization, and is itself a drag on growth and on democracy.
His 2009 commission for President Sarkozy of France (with Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi) on Mismeasuring Our Lives argued for replacing GDP with broader measures of well-being. Across forty years his consistent line has been that markets are powerful instruments that work well only within institutional and regulatory frameworks that direct them toward broadly shared prosperity — and that the dismantling of those frameworks since the 1980s has produced predictable and avoidable harms.