Professor Joseph Stiglitz to deliver the keynote address at this year’s Social Outcomes Conference

Professor Stiglitz will be known to many. He is a distinguished economist who has made major contributions to the fields of macroeconomics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, and to the theories of welfare economics and wealth distribution. Professor Stiglitz helped create the brand of economics, ‘the economics of information’, which explores the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneered pivotal concepts such as adverse selection and moral hazard. For his work, Stiglitz was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011.

Professor Stiglitz is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001. 

Professor Stiglitz is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD. This initiative seeks to address the perception of a growing gap between the image provided by macro-economic statistics on one side, and people’s perceptions of their own conditions and of society as whole on the other. The work of the HELG covers four substantive areas in the field of measuring economic performance and social progress: Theme I, Income and Wealth Inequality; Theme II, Multidimensional and Global Inequalities; Theme III, Multidimensional Subjective Well-Being; and Theme IV, Sustainability.  

Professor Stiglitz is the author of numerous books and several bestsellers. Recent titles include: Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity and Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being.