Profile

Committee Chair

Joseph Stiglitz

  • University Professor
    Department of Economics
    Columbia University
  • Chair
    Committee on Global Thought
    Columbia University

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a University Professor at Columbia University. He has been a Professor of Economics at Stanford, Princeton, Yale and All Souls College, Oxford. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001 for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information and his role in creating a new branch of economics, “the economics of information.” His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets to do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance. Stiglitz has held numerous posts advising governments. He has been Chairman of US President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, and, in 2008, was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Economic Progress. His book Globalization and Its Discontents has been translated into languages and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. His most recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, was published in March 2008.