Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress, Reader's Edition

by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Bruce Greenwald

Overview

Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader's Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work's central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text's central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231175494
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Series:	Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series
Edition description:	Reader's Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton. His books include Making Globalization Work; The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future; The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What to Do About Them; and Fair Trade for All (with Andrew Charlton). In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.

Bruce C. Greenwald is Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School. He is director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. His books include Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond; Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy Portfolio; Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (with Joseph E. Stiglitz); and Globalization: n. The Irrational Fear that Someone in China Will Take Your Job (with Judd Kahn).

Table of Contents

Preface to the Reader's Edition
Preface to the Original Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress: Basic Concepts and Analysis
1. The Learning Revolution
2. On the Importance of Learning
3. A Learning Economy
4. Creating a Learning Firm and a Learning Environment
5. Market Structure, Welfare, and Learning
6. The Welfare Economics of Schumpeterian Competition
7. Learning in a Closed Economy
8. The Infant-Economy Argument for Protection: Trade Policy in a Learning Environment
Part II. Policies for a Learning Society
9. The Role of Industrial and Trade Policy in Creating a Learning Society
10. Financial Policy and Creating a Learning Society
11. Macroeconomic and Investment Policies for a Learning Society
12. Intellectual Property
13. Social Transformation and the Creation of a Learning Society
14. Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

The New York Review of Books - Benjamin M. Friedman

Praise for Joseph Stiglitz:

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and he deserves to be. Over a long career, he has made incisive and highly valued contributions to the explanation of an astonishingly broad range of economic phenomena, including taxes, interest rates, consumer behavior, corporate finance, and much else. Especially among economists who are still of active working age, he ranks as a titan of the field.

Richard Nelson

If one's attention is on the economic long run and the processes involved in economic change, innovation and learning quickly can be seen as at the center of the stage. Unfortunately, for the last half century the bulk of the attention in microeconomic theorizing has been on economic statics which is blind to these variables. This book is a welcome exception.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for the original edition:

Profound and dazzling. The authors' analysis provides the foundations of an understanding of the progress and regress of nations. This is social science at its best.

Sir Partha Dasgupta

[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.

Harvard Business Review

Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge. The authors' analysis provides the foundations of an understanding of the progress and regress of nations. This is social science at its best.

Praise for the original edition from Sir Partha Dasgupta

Praise for the original edition:

"Profound and dazzling. The authors' analysis provides the foundations of an understanding of the progress and regress of nations. This is social science at its best."Sir Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge

"[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory."Harvard Business Review

Columbia University Press

From the Publisher

[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.

Harvard Business Review - Walter Frick

An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning. Indeed, when economic theory takes knowledge on board—with its specific features and modes of accumulation—many of the conventional conclusions break down, from the welfare properties of competitive markets to the virtues of 'comparative advantages' in international exchanges. At the same time, in learning economies, public policies and institutions are shown to play a paramount role. This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.

Giovanni Dosi

Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge. The authors' analysis provides the foundations of an understanding of the progress and regress of nations. This is social science at its best.

Partha Dasgupta

Praise for Joseph Stiglitz:

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and he deserves to be. Over a long career, he has made incisive and highly valued contributions to the explanation of an astonishingly broad range of economic phenomena, including taxes, interest rates, consumer behavior, corporate finance, and much else. Especially among economists who are still of active working age, he ranks as a titan of the field.

The New York Review of Books - Benjamin M. Friedman

If one's attention is on the economic long run and the processes involved in economic change, innovation and learning quickly can be seen as at the center of the stage. Unfortunately, for the last half century the bulk of the attention in microeconomic theorizing has been on economic statics which is blind to these variables. This book is a welcome exception.

Richard Nelson

If one's attention is on the economic long run and the processes involved in economic change, innovation and learning quickly can be seen as occupying the center of the stage. Unfortunately, for the last half century, the bulk of the attention in microeconomic theorizing has been on economic statics, which is blind to these variables. This book is a welcome exception.

Richard R. Nelson

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald have contributed a superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D. This important work continues the quest of Stiglitz and Greenwald for an appreciation of the role of public policy in overcoming market failures, asymmetries, and inefficiencies, and it provides insights on the limits and distortions of laissez-faire assumptions of optimality. This book should be at the very center of the next wave of policy debate.

Robert Kuttner

[Stiglitz is] an insanely great economist — almost every time you dig into some sub-field of economics…you find that much of the work rests on a seminal Stiglitz paper.

Paul Krugman