March 24, 2008
Contact: Emanuel Costache '09
Media Relations Intern
413/542-2321
Caroline Jenkins Hanna
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
Photos and audio of this event
AMHERST, Mass.—Joseph E. Stiglitz ’64, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and professor of economics at Columbia University, and William Easterly, former research economist at the World Bank, will participate in a discussion titled “Reducing Global Poverty” at Amherst College on Thursday, April 3. The event, an open forum which will take place on campus at 7 p.m. in Converse Hall’s Cole Assembly Room, is part of the Amherst College Colloquium Series (ACCS) and is free and open to the public. A book-signing will follow.
A graduate of Amherst College, Stiglitz served as senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. Before working at the World Bank, he was chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. The author of numerous books, including The Three Trillion Dollar War (Norton, 2008) with Linda Bilmes and Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2002), Stiglitz is also the founder of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University, and chairs the University of Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute.
In 1985, Easterly began his 16-year tenure at the World Bank as an economist and senior advisor in the macroeconomics and growth division. He then worked at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development before taking on teaching at New York University, where he is professor of economics, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution during the 2007-08 academic year. The author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006) and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), Easterly received his doctorate in economics at MIT.
Amherst’s ACCS explores pressing societal concerns in depth and features renowned speakers taking divergent positions. Each colloquium includes two days of lectures by the speakers and culminates in an open forum that is free to the general public. It is sponsored by the Office of the President at Amherst College.