Joseph Stiglitz

Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana into a Jewish family. His mother was Charlotte (née Fishman) was a teacher at Purdue University Calumet Campus, and his father was Nathaniel David Stiglitz, an insurance salesman. Stiglitz attended Amherst College, where he was a National Merit Scholar, active on the debate team, and president of the student government. During his senior year at Amherst College, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he later pursued graduate work. In Summer 1965, he moved to the University of Chicago to do research under Hirofumi Uzawa who had received an NSF grant. He studied for his PhD from MIT from 1966 to 1967, during which time he also held an MIT assistant professorship. Stiglitz stated that the particular style of MIT economics suited him well, describing it as "simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions."

From 1966 to 1970 he was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. Stiglitz initially arrived at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar in 1965, and he later won a Tapp Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge which was instrumental in shaping his understanding of Keynes and macroeconomic theory. In subsequent years, he held academic positions at Yale, Stanford, Oxford—where he was Drummond Professor of Political Economy—and Princeton. Since 2001, Stiglitz has been a professor at Columbia University, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and is an editor of The Economists' Voice journal with J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin.

He teaches classes for a double-degree program between Sciences Po Paris and École Polytechnique in Economics and Public Policy. He has chaired the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester since 2005. Stiglitz is widely considered a New-Keynesian economist, although at least one economics journalist says his work cannot be so clearly categorized.

Stiglitz has held several policy roles throughout his career. He served in the Clinton administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1997). At the World Bank, he served as a senior vice-president and the chief economist from 1997 to 2000. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies. Stiglitz has advised American president Barack Obama, but has criticized the Obama Administration's financial-industry rescue plan. He said whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is "either in the pocket of the banks or they're incompetent."

In October 2008, the President of the United Nations General Assembly asked him to chair a commission drafting a report on the reasons for and solutions to the 2008 financial crisis. In response, the commission produced the Stiglitz Report.

On July 25, 2011, Stiglitz participated in the "I Forro Social del 15M" organized in Madrid, expressing his support for the 15M Movement protestors.

Stiglitz was the president of the International Economic Association from 2011 to 2014.

On September 27, 2015, the United Kingdom Labour Party announced that Stiglitz was to sit on its Economic Advisory Committee along with five other world-leading economists.

Stiglitz serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the World.Minds Foundation, contributing to global ethical discussions on science, society, and responsibility.

Stiglitz married Jane Hannaway in 1978 but the couple later divorced. He married for the third time on October 28, 2004, to Anya Schiffrin, who works at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has four children and three grandchildren.

Criticism of rating agencies

Stiglitz has been critical of rating agencies, describing them as the "key culprit" in the 2008 financial crisis, noting "they were the party that performed the alchemy that converted the securities from F-rated to A-rated. The banks could not have done what they did without the complicity of the rating agencies."

Stiglitz co-authored a paper with Peter Orszag in 2002 titled "Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-Based Capital Standard" where they stated "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero." However, "the risk-based capital standard... may fail to reflect the probability of another Great Depression-like scenario."

Criticism of Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

Stiglitz warned that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) presented "grave risks" and it "serves the interests of the wealthiest."

Stiglitz also opposed the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal between the European Union (EU) and the United States, and has argued that the United Kingdom should consider its withdrawal from the EU in the 2016 referendum on the matter if TTIP passes, saying that "the strictures imposed by TTIP would be sufficiently averse to the functioning of government that it would make me think over again about whether membership of the EU was a good idea".