A 2001 Nobel Prize winner and economics professor at Columbia, Stiglitz is one of the country's leading economists and an outspoken critic of globalization. He's the author of a million books, such as The Roaring Nineties , Globalization and its Discontents and Making Globalization Work.

Born in Gary, Indiana, Stiglitz attended a number of academic institutions from Amherst College, the University of Chicago, to MIT and has held various positions at elite schools from Yale to Oxford. During his years in academia, he produced influential work on "screening" and "efficiency wages," which led him to politics in the Clinton Administration on the President's Council of Economic Advisors and the private sector as the senior vice president chief economist of the World Bank. In 2001 he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and somehow he also managed to find time to begin his long-term professorial post at Columbia and write a slew of books. He still dabbles in politics as an advisor the Obama administration (although he was ultimately critical of the financial-industry rescue plan) and has become involved in the European financial crisis as a chair on the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary Financial System, even though he formally supported the protests in Spain in 2011. [Image via Getty]