Joseph E. Stiglitz

 “Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.” Joseph E. Stiglitz

In the Preface to his new book “People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent” 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, born in 1943, wrote that he grew up in Gary on the southern shore of Lake Michigan during “the golden age of capitalism” only at the time it did not seem so golden: “I saw massive racial discrimination and segregation, great inequality, labor strife, and episodic recessions.” Stiglitz added that Gary had been founded in 1906 during a period of rapid industrialization but by the time he returned for his 55-year Horace Mann class reunion the city “had followed the country’s trajectory toward deindustrialization. It had become a filming location for Hollywood movies set in war zones or after the apocalypse.” Quite a few of his classmates had gone into the military and then become policemen. At the reunion, he wrote, “An argument broke out between a former policeman virulently criticizing the government and a former school teacher pointing out that the Social Security and disability payments the former policeman depended on came from the same government.”

Stiglitz’s mother was a teacher and his father an insurance salesman who worked out of an office in the Gary National Bank Building. In his Nobel Prize statement he declared, “There must have been something in the air of Gary that led me to economics: the first Nobel Prize winner [in Economics], Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary.” He added:

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed and debated intensely. My mother’s family were New Deal Democrats – they worshipped FDR; and though my uncle was a highly successful lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, he was staunchly pro-labor. My father, on the other hand, was probably more aptly described as a Jeffersonian democrat; a small businessman (an independent insurance agent) himself, he repeatedly spoke of the virtues of self-employment, of being one’s own boss, of self-reliance. He worried about big business and valued our competition laws. I saw him, conservative by nature, buffeted by the marked changes in American society during the near-century of his life, and adapt to these changes. By the mid-seventies, he had become a strong advocate of civil rights. He had a deep sense of civic and moral responsibility. He was one of the few people I knew who insisted on paying social security contributions for household help – regardless of whether they wanted it or not; he knew they would need it when they were old.

In school all of us had to learn, for instance, two trades (mine were printing and being an electrician). I had the good fortune of having dedicated teachers, who in spite of relatively large classes, provided a high level of individual attention. The extra-curricular activity in which I was most engaged – debating – helped shape my interests in public policy. Every year, a national debating topic is chosen; one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue – it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.

Valedictorian of his class, in 1960 Stiglitz gave a commencement address in which he spoke of his hope for cooperation between Gary’s largest employer, US Steel, and its work force. Afterwards, an uncle from Chicago, an avowed socialist, berated him for being naïve. When Stiglitz returned for his class reunion, he visited the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center and posed in front of his portrait within a mural by Felix Maldonado depicting the history of the city and some of its illustrious native sons and daughters.