Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz doesn’t shy away from tough questions. The Nobel Laureate of 2001 has been the chief economist of the World Bank as well as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to former US president Bill Clinton. Whatever arena he enters, 'Gentleman Joe' reaches the top.

As a public speaker, he hits the headlines by tackling the most hostile issues of our time. With brutal honesty, he debates topics like climate change, financial crises, the eurozone and the widening gap between the rich and poor. He’s been published in the Financial Times and interviewed by nearly every TV network across the globe. The economist is a thought leader whose sharp mind is paired with a high moral standard and it’s his voice for the poor that comes up whenever he talks about the imperfections of markets.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, 2001

Stiglitz sees the inequality of global societies as the root of the worst conflicts in what he refers to as our "wrongly ruled economy."

Why should we pick up the tab for other people?

The economist points to the one percent of our society, who in his opinion, are responsible for the growing gap between rich and poor.

"Let me give you an example," he says, straightening up his chair to talk about quantitative easing which is when a country’s central bank introduces new cash into the economy. "I understand the drive for it but think about how that works. It basically floods the economy with liquidity. In fact, investment is lower as a percentage of GDP, which props up stock prices.”

“And who wins when the stock price goes up?” he asks. “Those who own the shares. Who is that? The people at the top. What about the poor retirees depending on government bonds for their retirement? Their interest rates have gone down. This is a policy that has not led to more growth but more inequality."

How can we solve income inequality?

Stiglitz focuses on statistics, instead of economic development headlines.

“Income in the middle of the United States is lower than it was 25 years ago,” he says. “Medium income of a full-time male worker is lower than it was 40 years ago, and the real wages at the bottom are lower than they were 60 years ago.”

The economist seethes at politicians who rave about welfare programs. "These people don’t wanna be on welfare, they wanna work for a living,” he says. “And yet our economic system has failed them. They’re right to be angry.”

Stiglitz believes that this anger – the anger of those who feel left behind – is a natural social repercussion of a market that doesn’t work. The most recent case being the financial crisis of 2008. When it comes to who’s responsible, Stiglitz doesn’t hesitate.

"My theories had explained why it was so important to regulate and since one of the central problems with the financial market was gathering information, we shouldn’t expect the financial sector to work well,” Stiglitz says. “Anybody who studied history knew that they had repeatedly behaved badly. So, to me, the economists who said we didn’t need regulations were in part to blame for the deregulation that allowed the bankers to behave so badly."

What role did economists play in the financial crisis?

Stiglitz doesn’t believe that there’s an overnight fix for the economy but there is an agenda, he says, that can bring the economy back to strong growth. As a growing number of disenfranchised citizens search for hope in right-wing parties, it’s needed now more than ever.

"Give workers more bargaining rights, curb the power of corporations, create better corporate governance,” he says. “Curb the power of the financial sector, which grew from 2.5 percent to 8 percent of GDP with no evidence of any increase in productivity of our economy as a whole, and plenty of evidence of increased instability and inequality."

Born in 1943, only a few years after the Great Depression, Stiglitz spent his childhood in Gary, Indiana, a poor, industrial town defined by racial discrimination, high levels of inequality and episodic unemployment. It was his parents who encouraged him to do something to benefit all members of society.

Stiglitz earned a full scholarship to Amherst College, where he originally had his heart set on physics. He later realized that a degree in economics would be the best way for him to tackle social inequality, so he began working on his PhD at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After studying, and living through, recessions, depressions and financial crises, Stiglitz succeeded in undermining the presumption that markets always work. To him, it’s because they operate on imperfect or asymmetric information – in other words, markets in which one party has better or more information than the other. This, in Stiglitz’s view, was a primary contributor to economic inequality. The research won him the Nobel Prize in 2001, shared with George Akerlof and Michael Spence. Together they defined an alternative school of thought which changed the field profoundly.

Was economics based on fraud? 

With the help of his Nobel-winning economic framework, Stiglitz uncovered more gaps in the system and found possible solutions to fill them. He swings back and forth from studying microeconomics to macroeconomics. "Different countries are in different situations and we need basic norms that apply to everywhere," he says.

"Developing countries need to be able to pursue their development. So in my mind, we need global rules about climate change, to say if you pollute, you can’t trade. You can’t sell us goods produced in your factories that are contributing to global warming."

How can we make globalization work for everyone?

If you ask Stiglitz how he stays focused on all the different issues of our future economy, he remembers refers to one pivotal moment in his life. Washington D.C., August 28, 1963. Stiglitz was one of 250,000 people who stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King declare his famous words "I have a dream."

"It was such a moment, a moment not only of a speech, it was a moment of faith in American democracy." But the economist becomes reflective when he admits that King’s dream has yet to be realized. "I don’t think he fully realized how bad things were going to get in the area of economic divides. And his speech is, in a sense, a marker in our history and something that all of us need to consider when we think about where our country is going."

This moment of emotional introspection is quickly interrupted by his assistant, a meeting with some other professors is next on the agenda. The workaholic takes his last moment to give advice to the younger generation and shares an important message he received from his parents.

Are these words the foundation of his success? “I guess it was that mixture of idealism,” he says smiling. “What mattered was what you did and your ideas. And maybe a mild dose of overconfidence."