The Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum - Joseph Stiglitz

Climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and communications technology are disrupting economies, societies and even democracies around the world. While private sector investment plays an important role in developing innovative solutions to the problems societies face, the role of government is critical to shaping the direction, pace and distribution of innovation not just through funding for universities and research, but through the targets they set, the taxes and subsidies they create and the laws they make. 

In the first in-person event of 2022, we will hear an address from Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who will discuss the range of policies through which governments can shape not just the rate of innovation, but its direction and the distribution of its benefits. 

 Joseph E Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's research focuses on income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited