Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic capped by sharing
the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize and honorary degrees from
Harvard Cambridge Oxford and more than fifty other universities and elected not only to the
National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters but the Royal Society
and the British Academy a public servant who served as Chair of President Clinton's Council
of Economic Advisors and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank headed
international commissions for the UN and France and was awarded the French Legion of Honor and
Australia's Sydney Peace Prize a public intellectual whose numerous books on vital topics have
been best sellers. What brought him to economics were his concerns about the inequality and
discrimination he saw growing up. Wanting to understand what drives it and what can be done
about it has been his lifelong passion. This book gathers together and extends to new frontiers
this lifelong work drawing upon the challenges and insights of each of these phases of his
career. In a still very widely cited paper written fifty years ago Stiglitz set forth the
fundamental framework for analyzing intergenerational transfer of wealth and advantage which
plays a central role in persistent inequality. That and subsequent work developed most fully
here for the first time described today's inequality as a result of centrifugal forces
increasing inequality and centripetal forces reducing it. In recent decades the centrifugal
forces have strengthened the centripetal forces weakened. His general theory provides a
framework for understanding the marked growth in inequality in recent decades and for devising
policies to reduce it. A central message is that ever-increasing inequality is not
inevitable. Inequality is in a fundamental sense a choice. Stiglitz explains that inequality
does not largely arise from differences in savings rates between capitalists and others though
that may play a role (as Piketty Marx and Kaldor suggest) but rather it originates
importantly from the rules of the game which have weakened the bargaining power of workers as
they have increased the market power of corporations. He also explains how monetary authorities
have contributed to increasing wealth inequality and how unless something is done about it
likely changes in technology such as AI and robotization will make matters worse. He describes
policies that can simultaneously reduce inequality and improve economic performance.
