Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz is a former chief economist and vice-president for the World Bank (1997-99) and the chairman of US President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (1993-97). He was fired from the World Bank, in 1999, following a disagreement regarding globalization. Stiglitz is a joint winner of The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (2001).

In 2000 Joseph E. Stiglitz was professor of economics at Stanford University, USA (on leave) and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution[?]. On 10 October 2001 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (more commonly known as the "Nobel Prize in Economics"), jointly to George A. Akerlof, University of California, Berkeley, USA, A. Michael Spence[?], Stanford University, USA, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University, USA for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information[?].

A leading researcher in microeconomics, Stiglitz is the author of Whither Socialism[?], a nonmathematical book providing an introduction to the theories behind economic socialism's failure in Eastern Europe, the role of imperfect information in markets, and misconceptions about how truly "free market" our free market capitalist system operates. In 2002 Stiglitz wrote Globalization and Its Discontents[?], where he asserts that the International Monetary Fund puts the interest of "its largest shareholder," the U.S., above those of the poorer nations it was designed to serve. Stiglitz offers some reasons why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters, such as those at Seattle and Genoa.

Quotes

• April 2001 -- on the International Monetary Fund
  • "When a nation is down and out, the IMF takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up. It has condemned people to death. They don't care if people live or die. The policies undermine democracy...it's a little like the Middle Ages or the Opium Wars" (1 p.50-53)

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See also:

• Anti-globalization movement
• Capitalism
• Globalization
• World Trade Organization
• Corporatocracy

• List of economists
• List of economics consultancies and think tanks
• Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

References

• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast (2002)