STIGLITZ, JOSEPH E.

STIGLITZ, JOSEPH E. (1943– ), U.S. economist, professor; joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. Born in Gary, Indiana, to parents Nathaniel and Charlotte, he received a B.A. from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Stiglitz began his academic career teaching at such prestigious institutions as Yale, Stanford, Oxford, and Princeton. Stiglitz was an economic adviser to President Clinton from 1992 to 1997, and then spent three years (from 1997 to 2000) as a chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank. He then taught economics and international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York in the Columbia Business School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences department of economics, and the School of International and Public Affairs. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialog (IPG), based out of Columbia University. Along with teaching and work with the IPG, Stiglitz was a prolific writer, with a number of books and articles on world and national economics. Growing up in a middle-class family in industrial Gary, Stiglitz took note of the struggling steel town where plants were laying off hundreds of employees, or closing outright. He writes in his autobiography for the Nobel Prize that "the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them." As to the Gary of Stiglitz's youth, he goes on to describe that he had "the good fortune of having dedicated teachers, who in spite of relatively large classes, provided a high level of individual attention." First physics, and then economics, were his interests at Amherst, where he felt he could marry his passion for history, writing, and applying mathematics to social issues. At MIT, Stiglitz had at least four Nobel Prize winners as professors, no doubt catalysts for his later becoming a Nobel Prize winner as well. As chief economist at the World Bank, Stiglitz's outspoken criticism of policies undertaken by the World Bank's sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), caused a stir that led to his resignation in 2000. His issues with the IMF are discussed in some of his writings, including Globalization and Its Discontents. Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) in July 2000 at Columbia University. A global network of economists, political scientists, policymakers and others, the IPD was created as a think tank for solutions to global economic policy-making. The IPD analyzes economic policies and alternatives, and helps countries solve growth and globalization problems through task forces, dialogues, workshops, and research. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (known as the Nobel Prize) to Stiglitz and two others (George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence) in 2001, based on their individual contributions to the field of research in markets known as "asymmetric information." Stiglitz's contributions were in the form of clarifying the opposite type of market adjustment, showing that asymmetric information offers keys to understanding market phenomena such as unemployment and credit rationing. Stiglitz's other recognitions include the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Award (1979). He was also a fellow to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. Among Stiglitz's body of written work is The Roaring Nineties (2004); Globalization and Its Discontents (2002); Whither Socialism? (1994); and others, including titles edited by Stiglitz, and a variety of articles published in journals and magazines. (Lisa DeShantz Cook (2nd ed.)