Joseph Stiglitz and the Meaning of

Freedom
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joseph-stiglitz-and-the-meaning-of-
freedom

The famous liberal economist wants to take back the language of

liberty from the right.

By John Cassidy
April 25, 2024
Source photograph by Joel Saget / AFP / Getty
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was no
vaccine in sight and more than a thousand people who had contracted
the virus were dying each day in the United States, Joseph Stiglitz, the
economics professor and Nobel laureate, was isolating with his wife
at home, on the Upper West Side. Stiglitz, who is now eighty-one,
was a high-risk individual, and he followed the government’s
guidelines on masking and social distancing scrupulously. Not
everyone did, of course, and on the political right there were
complaints that the mask mandate, in particular, was an unjustified
infringement on individual freedom. Stiglitz strongly disagreed. “I
thought it was very clear that this was an example where one person’s
freedom is another’s unfreedom,” he told me recently. “Wearing a
mask was a very little infringement on one person’s freedom, and not
wearing a mask was potentially a large infringement on others.”

It also struck Stiglitz, who had served as chair of the White House
Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration,
that the experience of the pandemic could provide an opportunity for
a wide-ranging examination of the question of freedom and
unfreedom, which he had been thinking about from an economic
perspective for many years. The result is a new book, “The Road to
Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” in which he seeks to
reclaim the concept of freedom for liberals and progressives.
“Freedom is an important value that we do and ought to cherish, but it
is more complex and more nuanced than the Right’s invocation,” he
writes. “The current conservative reading of what freedom means is
superficial, misguided, and ideologically motivated. The Right claims
to be the defender of freedom, but I’ll show that the way they define
the word and pursue it has led to the opposite result, vastly reducing
the freedoms of most citizens.”
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Stiglitz’s title is a play on “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek’s

famous jeremiad against socialism, published in 1944. In making his
argument, Stiglitz takes the reader on a broad tour of economic
thinking and recent economic history, which encompasses everyone
from John Stuart Mill to Hayek and Milton Friedman—the author of
the 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom,” which has long been a
free-market bible—to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The going
can get a bit heavy when Stiglitz is explaining some tricky economic
concepts, but his essential argument comes across very clearly. It is
encapsulated in a quote from Isaiah Berlin, the late Oxford
philosopher, which he cites on his first page and returns to repeatedly:
“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

Stiglitz begins not with pandemic-era mask mandates but with the
American plague of gun violence. He notes that there is a simple
reason why the United States has far more gun deaths than other
countries do. It has far more guns, and, thanks to a tendentious
reading of the Second Amendment by the courts, including the
Supreme Court, many Americans now regard owning a gun, or even a
closet full of semi-automatic rifles, as a constitutionally protected
right. “The rights of one group, gun owners, are placed above what
most others would view as a more fundamental right, the right to
live,” Stiglitz writes. “To rephrase Isaiah Berlin’s quote . . . ‘Freedom
for the gun owners has often meant death to schoolchildren and adults
killed in mass shootings.’ ”

Gun violence and the spread of diseases by people who refuse to

abide by health guidelines are examples of what economists call
externalities, an awkward word that is derived from the fact that
certain actions (such as refusing to wear a mask) or market
transactions (such as the sale of a gun) can have negative (or positive)
consequences to the outside world. “Externalities are everywhere,”
Stiglitz writes. The biggest and most famous negative externalities are
air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of
businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful
emissions. The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points
out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later
generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge
amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea
levels.”

In all these cases, Stiglitz argues, restrictions on behavior are justified

by the over-all increase in human welfare and freedom that they
produce. In the language of cost-benefit analysis, the costs in terms of
infringing on individual freedom of action are much smaller than the
societal benefits, so the net benefits are positive. Of course, many gun
owners and anti-maskers would argue that this isn’t true. Pointing to
the gun-violence figures and to scientific studies showing that
masking and social distancing did make a difference to COVID-
transmission rates, Stiglitz gives such arguments short shrift, and he
insists that the real source of the dispute is a difference in values. “Are
there responsible people who really believe that the right to not be
inconvenienced by wearing a mask is more important than the right to
live?” he asks.

In 2002, five years after he left the White House, Stiglitz published
“Globalization and Its Discontents,” which was highly critical of the
International Monetary Fund, a multilateral lending agency based in
Washington. The book’s success—and the Nobel—turned him into a
public figure, and, over the years, he followed it up with further titles
on the global financial crisis, inequality, the cost of the war in Iraq,
and other subjects. As a vocal member of the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party, Stiglitz has expressed support for tighter financial
regulations, international debt relief, the Green New Deal, and hefty
taxes on very high incomes and large agglomerations of wealth.

During our sit-down interview, Stiglitz told me that, for a long time,
he had cavilled at the negative conception of freedom used by
conservative economists and politicians, which referred primarily to
the ability to escape taxation, regulation, and other forms of
government compulsion. As an economist accustomed to thinking in
theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding
“opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from
—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’
incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense,
anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty,
joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely,
policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as
income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher
education, enhance freedom.

Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves

his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative
politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple
of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to
promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the
expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax
cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social
programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating
industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight.
Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda,
Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the
entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and
the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These
baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of
economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of
the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had
been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism
that was at fault.”

Stiglitz’s approach to freedom isn’t exactly new, of course. Rousseau

famously remarked that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in
chains.” In “Development as Freedom,” published in 1999, the
Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argued, in the
context of debates about poverty and economic growth in developing
economies, that the goal of development should be to expand people’s
“capabilities,” which he defined as their opportunities to do things
like nourish themselves, get educated, and exercise political freedoms.
“The Road to Freedom” falls in this tradition, which includes another
noted philosopher, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Stiglitz cites
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, delivered in January, 1941, in
which the President added freedom from want and freedom from fear
to freedom of speech and freedom of worship as fundamental liberties
that all people should enjoy.

“A person facing extremes of want and fear is not free,” Stiglitz

writes. He describes how, at a high-school reunion, he spoke with
former classmates from the city he grew up in—Gary, Indiana, which
had once been a thriving center of steel production. “When they
graduated from high school, they said, they had planned to get a job at
the mill just like their fathers. But with another economic downturn
hitting they had no choice—no freedom—but to join the military . . . .
Deindustrialization was taking away manufacturing jobs, leaving
mainly opportunities that made use of their military training, such as
the police force.”

Among the hats Stiglitz wears is one as chief economist at the

Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. He doesn’t claim to have
a surefire recipe for reviving rusting American steel towns. But in the
second half of “The Road to Freedom” he calls for the creation of a
“progressive capitalism” that would look nothing like the neoliberal
variant he has spent the past two decades excoriating. In this “good
society,” the government would employ a full range of tax, spending,
and regulatory policies to reduce inequality, rein in corporate power,
and develop the sorts of capital that don’t appear in G.D.P. figures or
corporate profit-and-loss statements: human capital (education), social
capital (norms and institutions that foster trust and coöperation), and
natural capital (environmental resources, such as a stable climate and
clean air). Not-for-profits and workers’ coöperatives would play a
larger role than they do now, particularly in sectors where the profit
motive can easily lead to abuses, such as caregiving for the sick and
elderly.

In political terms, Stiglitz started out as a self-described centrist. Over

the years, he has shifted to the left and become ever more gimlet-eyed
about how policies and laws are made and upheld, and whom they
benefit. In “The Road to Freedom,” he inveighs against the Supreme
Court for adopting the perspective of the “white male slave-owning
drafters of the Constitution,” and reminds us that conservative
billionaires and major corporations underwrote the neoliberal policy
revolution, which bestowed upon big corporations what Stiglitz refers
to as “The Freedom to Exploit.” He writes, “We cannot divorce the
current distribution of income and wealth from the current and
historical distribution of power.”

Given this conjuncture, and the rise of authoritarian populists like

Trump, Orbán, and Bolsonaro, it is easy to get fatalistic about the
prospects for creating the “good society” that Stiglitz describes, in
which “freedoms of citizens to flourish, to live up to their
potential . . . are most expansive.” He’s under no illusion that winning
the battle of ideas would be sufficient to bring about such a
transformation. But he’s surely right when he writes that, if “we
successfully dismantle the myths about freedom that have been
propagated by the Right,” and reshape the popular conception of
human liberty in a more mutual and positive direction, it would be an
important first step.

And how likely is that? In his book, Stiglitz lists a number of reasons
to be pessimistic, including the fact that “neoliberal ideology runs
deep in society,” and that people stubbornly “discount information
that runs counter to their preconceptions and presumptions.” On the
positive side, he points to a widespread rejection, particularly among
younger people, of the neoliberal approach to issues like inequality
and climate change. During our conversation, he cited the Biden
Administration’s industrial policy, which provides generous
incentives to green-energy producers and purchasers of electric
vehicles, as an example of a “sea change” in views about economic
policymaking. “Neoliberalism is on the defensive,” he said. However,
he also noted the enduring power of simplistic slogans about freedom
and averred that he didn’t want to sound like a Pollyanna. “I am
optimistic, over-all,” he said. “But it is going to be a battle.” ♦

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John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.
He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more for
newyorker.com.
More:Joseph StiglitzEconomicsProgressives

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