The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

Dr. Joseph Stiglitz
Columbia University

7:00pm, Thursday
April 30th, 2015

Buy
Season Tickets and Individual Tickets Online NOW!

Or Call 800.992.8499
No ticketing charge for Season Tickets.

Joseph
Stiglitz
Columbia University

Joseph E. Stiglitz received his PhD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970. 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 of the university's Initiative for Policy Dialogue, and a member of its Committee on Global Thought.

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 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 book is The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, published by W.W. Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane in June 2012.

A singular voice of reason in an era defined by bitter politics and economic uncertainty, Joseph E. Stiglitz has time and again diagnosed America’s greatest economic challenges, from the Great Recession and its feeble recovery to the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The Great Divide gathers his most provocative reflections on the subject of inequality, probing for answers to the greatest threat to American prosperity and explaining its role in the country’s ongoing malaise.

As Stiglitz ably argues, a healthy economy and a fairer democracy are within our grasp, if we can put aside misguided interests and abandon failed policies. Opening with the essay that gave the Occupy Movement its slogan, “We are the 99%,” later essays in The Great Divide reveal equality of opportunity as a national myth and explain reforms that would spur higher growth, more opportunity, and greater equality.