Whither Socialism?
book by Joseph Eugene Stiglitz
Whither Socialism? is a book on economics by Joseph Stiglitz, first published in 1994 by MIT Press.
Description
Whither Socialism? is based on Stiglitz's Wicksell Lectures, presented at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1990 and presents a summary of the central themes of information economics and serves as a primer on the theory of markets with imperfect information and imperfect competition as well as being a critique of both free market and market socialist approaches (see Roemer critique, op. cit.). Stiglitz explains how the neoclassical, or Walrasian model ("Walrasian economics" refers to the result of the process which has given birth to a formal representation of Smith's notion of the invisible hand, along the lines put forward by Walras and encapsulated in the general equilibrium model of Arrow–Debreu), which has dominated economic thought over the past half century, may have wrongly encouraged the belief that market socialism could work. Stiglitz proposes an alternative model, based on the information economics established by the Greenwald–Stiglitz theorems, that aims to provide greater theoretical insight into the workings of a market economy and offer clearer guidance for the setting of policy in transitional economies.
One of the reasons Stiglitz sees for the critical failing in the standard neoclassical model, on which market socialism was built, is its assumptions concerning information, particularly its failure to consider the problems that arise from lack of perfect information and from the costs of acquiring information. He also identifies problems arising from its assumptions concerning completeness.
Critique
Whither Socialism?
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7996494. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 1990.
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