Leadership Luncheon – Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
Wednesday, February 10 is the correct event date.
Special note: This event was originally schedule to take place on Tuesday, February 9. The calendar you just received in your mailbox was printed before the luncheon date changed. We apologize for any confusion this may cause.
In recent decades, America has undergone a dramatic transformation from a country that held out the promise of opportunity for all, to a place with the worst inequality in the most advanced nations, where a wealthy minority dominates politics and the economy.
Inequality is not the fatalistic consequence of economic laws. The intertwining of economic and political systems determines the distribution of wealth and income, and both the market distribution of income and the post-tax and transfer distribution.
A real agenda would simultaneously increase economic efficiency, fairness, and opportunity. Governments ought to begin by rewriting the rules in ways which improve the market distribution of income by, for instance, curbing the excesses at the top, implementing stronger competition laws, and improving corporate governance.
Other parts of the agenda focus on curbing the transmission of advantage from one generation to another and providing hope for the large fractions of the world’s children growing up in poverty.
Please join us for our Winter 2016 Leadership Luncheon, co-hosted by the United Nations Association of New York, and hear Dr. Stiglitz in his compelling presentation of how these reforms will simultaneously lead to improved economic performance.
JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York, where he is also the founder and Co-President of the university’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue. He is also the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, Time named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is now serving as President of the International Economic Association.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008 he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which released its final report in September 2009 (published as Mismeasuring Our Lives). He now chairs a High Level Expert Group at the OECD attempting to advance further these ideas. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009 (published as The Stiglitz Report). Since the crisis, he has played an important role in the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which seeks to reform the discipline so it is better equipped to find solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.
Stiglitz serves on numerous boards, including the Acumen Fund and Resources for the Future.
Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, “The Economics of Information,” exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but also of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.
His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.
In the last fifteen years, he has written a series of highly popular books that have had an enormous influence in shaping global debates. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) has been translated into 35 languages, besides at least two pirated editions, and in the non-pirated editions have sold more than one million copies worldwide. In that book he laid bare the way globalization had been managed, especially by the international financial institutions. In two later sequels, he presented alternatives: Fair Trade for All (2005, with Andrew Charlton) and Making Globalization Work (2006). In The Roaring Nineties (2003), he explained how financial market deregulation and other actions of the 1990s were sowing the seeds of the next crisis. Concurrently, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (2003, with Bruce Greenwald) explained the fallacies of current monetary policies, identified the risk of excessive financial interdependence, and highlighted the central role of credit availability. Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010) traced in more detail the origins of the Great Recession, outlined a set of policies that would lead to robust recovery, and correctly predicted that if these policies were not pursued, it was likely that we would enter an extended period of malaise. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University), helped reshape the debate on those wars by highlighting the enormous costs of those conflicts. His most recent books are The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, published by W.W. Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane in 2012; The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them published by W.W. Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane in 2015; and Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress, with Bruce Greenwald, published by Columbia University Press in 2014.
Stiglitz’s work has been widely recognized. Among his awards are more than 40 honorary doctorates, including from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Loeb Prize for this contributions to journalism. Among the prizes awarded to his books have been the European Literary Prize, the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Books and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Econometric Society, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy.
He has been decorated by several governments, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Korea, and most recently became a member of France’s Legion of Honor (rank of Officier).
Do you want to know more?
How to Fix Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz
Special notes: This is a small formal seated luncheon. Seating is very limited.
Registration: 12:00PM
Luncheon: 12:30PM
Program: 1:15PM
Cost: $75 for members, $85 for guests
CUCNY member event fees will be billed to the member’s account.
All reservations are final on February 3.
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