WORK
Creating a Learning Society
Greenwald and Stiglitz's 2014 treatise arguing that economic growth depends not on static allocation efficiency but on the dynamic capacity of societies to learn — a framework that makes the economic case for the educational and research institutions the AI transition most urgently requires.
Creating a Learning Society grew out of Stiglitz's 2008 Arrow Lectures at Columbia and represents the most developed articulation of the Greenwald–Stiglitz framework for economic growth. The central argument inverts the standard treatment of technology as an exogenous input to production. Technology is endogenous — produced within the economic system through investments in learning — and the policies that promote growth are therefore those that sustain the learning infrastructure. The book develops this argument with analytical rigor, empirical support, and direct policy implications for industrial policy, education, intellectual property, and the governance of knowledge. Applied to the AI transition, the framework provides the economic foundation for the public investment in education, research, and judgment-building institutions that the market will not fund and that the transition desperately requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's analytical core is the distinction between static efficiency and dynamic