Stiglitz

Last year, about this time, I wrote about getting a chance to go hear UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak here at the school as a part of the World Leaders Forum that Columbia hosts. They hosted the forum again this year, and while I didn’t consider the list of attending dignitaries to be quite as compelling as last year, two people who I went to hear speak did stand out to me. The first is Joseph Stiglitz.
( I apologize for the fact that these next two pictures are poor, the auditorium I took them in makes the lighting hard. )
Those outside the Econ community may not know who Stiglitz is, but most of those within the community will. Among other things, he has served on the President’s Council of Econ advisors (under Clinton), been Chief Economist of the World Bank, and received the Nobel Prize in Econ for his work on asymmetric information. (In simple terms, he explored some of the implications of economic exchanges when two parties do not have the same information about that exchange). He also wrote a book called ‘Globalization & Its Discontents’, which I’d read parts of back in my econ classes at BCC. Smart guy, for sure.
I always like getting a chance to hear these well known figures speak, so I was interested to see what Stiglitz would be like in person. He was speaking that evening about his new book, ‘Making Globalization Work’, which I haven’t read (but I imagine is good, or at the very least well thought out). He struck me as a good guy, obviously very bright, decent speaker, articulates his ideas very clearly. One thing that did strike me as funny is that he comes across a bit as the genius but absent-minded professor; he had this strange habit of taking long pauses for no apparent reason in the middle of his talk, and then resuming again where he’d left off. It also appeared that he was reading from notes or a prepared speech, something I always find a bit disappointing. But it wasn’t a bad presentation, and I was glad to get to hear him talk, even though he didn’t blow me away.
But the main reason I was there that evening wasn’t to hear Joe Stiglitz. It was instead to hear …