Joseph Stiglitz

Origins and early life

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, then a great steel town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, on 9 February 1943, the son of Nathaniel Stiglitz, an independent insurance agent, and of Charlotte Fishman, a teacher. He was born into a Jewish family, a high-school personality test once suggested he would do well as a rabbi, and in April 2017 he put it in his own words: “I am Jewish”.

Work and career

From the public schools of Gary he went in 1960 to Amherst College, switched from physics to economics in his third year, and left for MIT without a degree to study under Samuelson, Solow, Modigliani and Arrow. A Fulbright fellowship took him to Cambridge in 1965, and he went on to teach at Yale, Stanford, Oxford and Princeton, receiving the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. His share of the economics of information showed what the poorly informed side of a market can do to draw information out of the better informed: an insurer, for instance, can sort its clients into risk classes by offering a menu of contracts in which a higher deductible buys a much lower premium.

With Andrew Weiss he showed in the same spirit why banks may ration credit rather than raise their rates, and with Carl Shapiro in 1984 why unemployment can persist even in equilibrium. He sat on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 and chaired it from 1995 to 1997, then served as chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000.

Recognition

He shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with George Akerlof and Michael Spence, a third each, “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information”, the year he joined Columbia University.

Personal life

He has written for the general reader since his 2002 book Globalization and Its Discontents, and in 2004 he married Anya Schiffrin, of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.