The Price of Inequality

The Price of Inequality is the book where Stiglitz consolidated his framework for thinking about contemporary inequality. The central argument integrates three analytical threads developed across his career: information economics showing how markets with severe asymmetries produce concentration, rent-seeking analysis showing how much contemporary wealth represents extraction rather than creation, and institutional critique showing how political capture produces the rules that generate further concentration. The book's power comes from its integration: inequality is not a side effect of technological change or an unavoidable consequence of market competition. It is the predictable outcome of a specific institutional arrangement, and different arrangements would produce different outcomes. Applied to the AI transition, the framework becomes urgent: the technology amplifies the dynamics the book diagnoses, and the institutional response the book prescribes is being actively prevented by the forces the book identifies as the beneficiaries of the current arrangement.