Joseph E. Stiglitz

Stiglitz took the Nobel in 2001 for showing what happens to markets when the two sides of a deal do not know the same things, which is nearly all deals and which undermines a good deal of textbook economics. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and then became chief economist at the World Bank, where he attacked the austerity conditions the International Monetary Fund attached to its rescues during the Asian crisis and left in 2000 after the row. Globalization and Its Discontents came out of that. People, Power, and Profits argues that American capitalism now runs on rent extraction rather than on producing anything. He co-chaired a French commission on why gross domestic product is a poor measure of whether life is getting better.