The liberal leftist economist’s latest popular book targets the narrow ‘liberty’ of the political right and makes a positive case for a progressive capitalism which would promote the expanded freedoms of the many
Joseph Stiglitz is a prominent American economist and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001. His work classes him as a neoclassical thinker, broadly speaking belonging to the school of economic thought which dominates the mainstream, but he has been tireless in both academic and popular works in critiquing free market and neoliberal ideas from within the neoclassical approach.
The Road to Freedom (hereafter TRTF) is his latest popular book, and he has been working hard to promote it in recent weeks, popping up on various news and politics programmes here in the UK, and no doubt elsewhere. His previous book, People, Power and Profits, focussed on the US, calling for substantial reforms which he hoped would produce a fairer, more prosperous, productive and sustainable economy, society and politics. In that book, as in his latest, and in much of his life’s work, he has adopted a ‘market imperfectionist’ or ‘market failure’ approach to neoclassical economics, which argues that in the absence of sufficient regulation and intervention by the state, markets are inefficient and are unlikely to produce productive, socially just and environmentally sustainable outcomes. This leads him to state that free markets are almost universally inefficient, hence the call for much greater policy intervention to improve matters. He also emphasises the key role of politics in influencing economic outcomes, and the need to change it in order to enact and sustain the policies that he favours for the long term. Continue reading