Why wouldn't he have started one of the numerous profitable companies of the 50s? It seems more likely that an entrepreneur would do that rather than work in another field.
> In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire.
This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality.
The innovation that happened in 1950 consisted of General Electric getting into a new line of business, not a grad student starting his own company.
The main argument of Keynesianism always comes down to the baseline of wealth for all people though. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal. Not necessarily equality of outcomes for each individual.
I'm not sure human beings really think like that. I suspect many people would be happy to freeze the economy at its current size, so long as they stay near the top. How many people would swap places for a historical monarch, even when most such monarchs didn't have a flushing toilet?
I think relative status looms large in many peoples minds.
There needs to be a reckoning about what the goals of economic control are, because the current thought, "as long as it's going up for most people", doesn't seem to square with what people actually feel.
Wage and salary suppression is a real thing and will eventually bring our society to the breaking point. We are just beginning to feel the first tremors.
Yet a person in the third world is now able to feed a whole family and live in relative comfort even on the cut rate salaries of outsourced programming work. The point is that as long as the total amount of wealth generated in the world increases, the ends justify the means.
The report below shows global wealth from 1960 - 2015.
Per capita average ingome has increased, from $8.8/day to $17.7/day, or about $3100/yr to $6200/yr. (Fig 2.1, p. 19.)
The ratio of income disparity between the US and the world's poorest country has increased, from 47:1 in 1950 (Tanzania) to 73:1 2000 (Sierra Leone). (Fig 22.3, p. 25.)
https://piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/348/2iie3489....
Multiple authorities state that the state of the poorest people in the world is worse now than at the beginning of tyhee Industrial Revolution. E.g., Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, Chapter 1. Available online.