As you will surmise from the title, a reference to Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s influential 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, Stiglitz Argues against Hayek’s (and probably more so, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman’s) beliefs that “free” markets are inherently competitive, and that government intervention makes them less so, creating less individual freedom, popular immiseration, and eventually slippery-sloping to authoritarian regimes, ideas that Milton successfully championed and which became neoliberal economic and political orthodoxy from the Reagan-Thatcher era, ushering in our globalized world of corrupt crony capitalism, rampant inequality, insufficient social safety nets, increasing political polarization, and populism.

Using Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”, Stiglitz argues that the neoliberals over-emphasize the importance of negative liberty (freedom from coercion), not appreciating that in a society, the complex web of reciprocal relationship entail that one person freedom is often another’s unfreedom. Stiglitz catalogs the many obvious examples of this truth throughout the book, demonstrating the over-simplistic, one-sidedness of attacks against government regulation (read: “protections”) that are necessary to ensure competitive markets (which demonstrably do not obtain on their own in most circumstances given the stringent assumptions [price-taking sellers and buyers who may freely enter and exit and possess symmetric information, executing transactions which internalize all costs and risks] required by microeconomic theory), as well as to maximize overall freedom for all individuals, taking into account the barriers to exercising positive liberty (freedom to pursue goals) given one’s capacities and circumstances, which are in large part dictated by societal arrangements.

Stiglitz argues that given its theoretical shortcomings and the significant evidence of its failure to create a good society, we should reject neoliberalism, and instead adopt the political and economic order that would obtain if we considered matters from behind political philosopher John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” masking our position in society—ability, income, identity—so we knew not our privilege and instead formulated just economic and political arrangements that truly promoted a good society.

Stiglitz calls this set of just arrangements democratic, progressive capitalism. While The Road to Freedom lacks detailed policy proposals, the overall program outlined throughout will be a familiar and fairly obvious promotion of measures to increase equality and freedom, including checks on power (ensuring “freedom from” by limiting coercion from those on top) across all domains, and social welfare programs (increasing capacity for “freedom to” for those on the bottom): Voting rights and other protections of democratic representation; a strong ‘fourth estate’ of fact-based media; accountability for media platforms polluting the infosphere with mis-/dis-/mal-information; active enforcement of anti-trust laws to ensure competition; protection of labor’s right to organize to protect workers; robust provision of public goods funded by steeply progressive taxation; a floor on incomes; provision of basic healthcare as a right; …

How we might get there is, of course, the challenge. Developing specific policies and programs is probably the easiest part, as we have plenty of examples to draw on from the successful social democracies of Europe and lots of academic proposals and stalled legislation already drawn up.  The bigger issue is that our current political and information environment is such that, as Stiglitz laments, “the Enlightenment has to be relitigated daily”.