Most economists love markets, but my guest today, Nobel Prize winning

economist Joseph Stiglitz is an exception to that rule.

He's devoted his life to exposing the limits of markets.

One of the arguments in my book is that, in a sense, neoliberal capitalism is self-devouring a world in which you just

leave it to the markets you're going to wind up with selfish people, monopolies, and the system won't work well.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

There are few top economists who I don't know personally,

but Joseph Stiglitz is one of them.

I've never actually spoken to him before.

His brand of economics, which focuses on how markets go awry

when people don't have all the information

they need or want for making choices. That approach wasn't very popular

at the University of Chicago where I've spent my career, so we just didn't cross past.

What I find most fascinating about Stiglitz is how much he's transformed over his career.

He went from an academic focused on highly mathematical theories to a pragmatic policymaker

and ultimately to a public intellectual and maybe even an advocate.

There are very few academic economists who end up in that space.

I've been to the University of Chicago almost my whole career and I went there having been

trained at Harvard and MIT thinking that I'd only stay a few years and that I'd head back to Harvard or MIT or Princeton.

But I got seduced by the intellectual environment

at Chicago.

Now I know you spent a year at the University of Chicago

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