# Joseph Stiglitz **Joseph E. Stiglitz** (b. February 9, 1943, Gary, Indiana) shared the 2001 Nobel with [[George Akerlof]] and Michael Spence "for laying the foundations for the theory of markets with asymmetric information" — the demonstration that when one side of a transaction knows more than the other, markets do not clear the way the textbook says, and the case for the invisible hand collapses at the level of the theorem. He is University Professor at Columbia (since 2001), was chair of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (1995–97) and chief economist of the [[World Bank]] (1997–2000), and is the profession's most credentialed critic of what the vault calls [[Free Market Fundamentalism]]. Nine Economics pages link here because his work is the standard reply to nearly every school-of-thought page in the folder. ## The theory [[Information Asymmetry]] is the entry. Akerlof's lemons, Spence's signaling and Stiglitz's screening together showed that credit rationing, unemployment, insurance failure and the rest are not frictions on an efficient market but predictable outcomes of unequal information — which is why [[Neoclassical Economics]] and [[Classical Economics]] cite him as the internal critic, and [[Heterodox Economics]] and [[Marxian Economics]] as the mainstream economist who conceded their point. His later work turned the same lens on inequality: *The Price of Inequality* (2012) argued that American inequality is produced by rent-seeking and rule-writing, not productivity; *People, Power, and Profits* (2019) and *The Road to Freedom* (2024) argue that "freedom" as the right uses it is the freedom of the powerful to constrain everyone else — a direct answer to Hayek's title. ## The dissident His World Bank tenure ended in February 2000 after he publicly attacked the [[International Monetary Fund]]'s handling of the 1997 Asian crisis and the "Washington Consensus" of austerity, privatization and capital-account liberalization; Treasury Secretary Larry Summers pressed for his departure. *Globalization and Its Discontents* (2002) turned the episode into the standard critique of 1990s globalization from inside the institutions that ran it — and, read now, into an early account of the grievances that populists of both left and right would later organize. The [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] page places him at the Roosevelt Institute, the progressive counterweight to the network of [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] institutions the vault maps. ## 2025–26 Stiglitz led sixteen Nobel laureates in a June 2024 letter warning that Trump's fiscal and trade proposals would reignite inflation, and has spent the second term as the most-cited academic critic of the [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] and of the administration's affordability claims (his February 2026 State of the Union response is the reference). Where [[Paul Krugman]] argues the tariffs are bad trade policy, Stiglitz argues they are bad *information* policy — that a government which fires its statisticians ([[Bureau of Labor Statistics]]) and prices its trade rules by deficit rather than by tariff is governing blind. [[Thomas Piketty]] is the third figure in the vault's inequality triad. ## See Also - [[Information Asymmetry]] · [[George Akerlof]] · [[Neoclassical Economics]] · [[Heterodox Economics]] · [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] - [[Paul Krugman]] · [[Thomas Piketty]] · [[Keynesian Economics]] · [[Supply-Side Economics]] · [[Economics Hub]] - [[World Bank]] · [[International Monetary Fund]] · [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] · [[Liberation Day Tariffs]]