The Road to Freedom

Economics and the Good Society

De: Joseph E. Stiglitz

Narrado por: Paul Boehmer

Forces on the political Right have justified exploitation by cloaking it in the rhetoric of freedom, leading to pharmaceutical companies freely overcharging for medication, a Big Tech free from oversight, politicians free to incite rebellion, corporations free to pollute, and more. How did we get here?

In The Road to Freedom, Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dissects America's current economic system and the political ideology that created it, laying bare their twinned failure. Free and unfettered markets have exploited consumers, workers, and the environment alike. These movements now pose a real threat to true economic and political freedom.

As an economic advisor to presidents and as chief economist at the World Bank, Stiglitz has witnessed these profound changes firsthand. As he argues, the failures follow from the elites' unshakeable dedication to "the neoliberal experiment."

The Road to Freedom breaks new ground, showing how economics reframes how to think about freedom and the role of the state in a twenty-first century society. Stiglitz explains a deeper, more humane way to assess freedoms-one that considers what to do when one person's freedom conflicts with another's.

©2024 Joseph E. Stiglitz (P)2024 Tantor

Best book on politics and power ever

Stiglitz has offered a clear treatise on how our economic system that has dominated world economics for over 70 years has delivered a system where wealth and the power it delivers has damaged our society, our democracy, and our sense of right and wrong to such a degree that some change is needed before we fall into outright fascism. Our tolerance of inequity, and the grievances that it creates have been distorted by media, political perspectives, and political funding to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful to the detriment of less advantaged even those who might be considered privileged but to a lesser degree.

The story was refreshing

Thank you! I really enjoyed hearing about the existence of other political systems that are not so extremist and it shaped my world view to the point that it went to a different degree. It doesn’t hurt that this is told by a Nobel prize winner, this kept my ears glued to the speaker.

Send neoliberalism into the abyss where it belongs

In this book Joseph Stiglitz effectively shreds the destructive neoliberal economic dogma that has caused such immense suffering for the past 50 years. Siglitz artfully debunks the theories of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek so that they now no longer may be asserted as if they were axiomatic truths. As the title of this book deliciously pans Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, Siglitz demonstrates with overwhelming empirical evidence and associated supporting logic how the neoliberal heaven of absence of regulation has produced exactly the opposite of freedom, and has instead produced a serfdom of its own, in which people have no freedom to be themselves for fear of losing their livelihoods.

Stiglitz frequently references John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” throughout the book as a means of achieving the necessary impartiality in implementing the economics of a good society—treating everyone according to their inherent humanity is always good policy. Stiglitz effectively exposes the lie of neoliberalism that claims the answer is an unrestrained free market, by objectively demonstrating that there is no such thing as a free market, as all of society is rigged at so many different levels—and he damningly illustrates how Friedman and Hayek (and their disciples) knew this to be true and deliberately ignored this inconvenient evidence.

Government regulation, on the other hand (as Stiglitz illustrates in this book), has demonstrated its superior economic effects by the results it produces—greater advances in research, higher productivity, and greater wealth for all who accept its reasonable restraints on excesses. It's readily evident that neoliberalism has no plan (except to let the bullies rule the playground)—in stark contrast, properly executed industrial policy does provide the necessary framework and energy for all people to be prosperous (not just a few kleptocratic oligarchs). Fortunately there are increasing numbers of voices correcting the disinformation of neoliberalism, among whom Joseph Stiglitz is a most prominent voice. Let's join them in advancing this common sense doctrine and send neoliberalism into the abyss where it belongs—for the sake of all of us.

Friedman vs Stiglitz

I’m not sure who quite won this match.
Nevertheless, his arguments are quite convincing, but the Achilles heel of the argument is the notion of tribalism.


Economics is ultimately a set of preferences and values that humans subscribe to.


Econometrics has usurped mathematics. it is the same problem that Plato, Aristotle and Socrates suffered from: values cannot be derived mathematically. The Pythagorean theorem has nothing to do with the theory of forms and whether there is a concept of absolute justice and truth.


Of course the answer is somewhere in the middle between Friedman and Stiglitz .


Ultimately, I believe this is merely just a matter of the pendulum swinging from right to left, and his arguments are timely, pragmatic, and I think cannot be ignored.

His reference to John Rawls the theory of Justice is also quite useful, although Rawls has been disparaged by Thomas Sowell as not being pragmatic

Call to urgency

Complexity of reality must take center stage. Freedom itself is complex and should be wrestled with.

The narration is horrible

Unfortunately, it sounds like the book is narrated by a very bad version of chatgpt. The narrator does not pause at commas or stop at fullstops.
The overall message is okay but the narration ruins an otherwise good book, I might have to buy a paperback instead.

The truth put delicately

Bottom line is that these are either truths people need to know about economics and capitalist society, especially in the USA. unfortunately some of the authors examples are weak and won't hold up to many skeptical readers.

ex. getting a vaccine should be mandatory because your freedom to choose takes away someone else's freedom to live. (This simply isn't true, and it discounts the very valid (and invalid) reasons people would be hesitant or opposed to getting a brand new vaccine that was rushed through for approval.

Oddly some of these examples have the same over simplified reasoning that lead to the rise of neo-liberalism in the first place.

once you get over the stupid examples and pay attention to the actual concepts, you'll see progressive capitalism is more a matter of common sense than something radical.

A leftist intellectual gives you his definition of freedom

Very simplistic attempt to rewrite common sense. Neo liberals like our founding fathers defined freedom as freedom from government because government was the ultimate source of evil in human history. This book defines freedom as a welfare check. It claims that those who don't do as well as others in a free market don't have the freedom to buy a big house, to travel ,to send their kids to Ivy League schools etc so the government needs to step in with a variety of welfare checks so that everyone is equally free.