The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
Title The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society PDF eBook
Author Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Pages 326
Release 2024-04-23
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 1324074388

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From one of the world’s leading economists, a compelling new vision of personal and economic freedom. We are a nation born from the conviction that people must be free. But since the middle of the last century, that idea has been co-opted. 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? Whose freedom are we—and should we—be thinking about? 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 only succeeded in delivering a series of crises: the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, and the crisis of inequality. While a small portion of the population has amassed considerable wealth, wages for most people have stagnated. Free and unfettered markets have exploited consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Such failures have fed populist movements that believe being free means abandoning any obligations citizens have to one another. As they grow in strength, 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.” Explicitly taking on giants such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Stiglitz exposes accepted ideas about our political and economic life for what they are: twisted visions that tear at the social fabric while they enrich the very few. The Road to Freedom breaks new ground, showing how economics—including recent advances in which Stiglitz has played such an important role—reframes how to think about freedom and the role of the state in a twenty-first century society. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, Stiglitz explains a deeper, more humane way to assess freedoms—one that considers with care what to do when one person’s freedom conflicts with another’s. We must reimagine our existing economic and legal systems and embrace forms of collective action, including regulation and investment, if we are to create an innovative society in which everyone can flourish. The task could not be more urgent, and Stiglitz’s latest book is essential reading for those committed to the American ideal of an economic and political system that delivers well-being, opportunity, and meaningful freedoms for all.

The Road to Freedom

The Road to Freedom
Title The Road to Freedom PDF eBook
Author Arthur C. Brooks
Publisher Basic Books
Pages 226
Release 2012-05-08
Genre Political Science
ISBN 0465029418

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Entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and upward mobility: These traditions are at the heart of the free enterprise system, and have long been central to America's exceptional culture. In recent years, however, policymakers have dramatically weakened these traditions -- by exploding the size of government, propping up their corporate cronies, and trying to reorient our system from rewarding merit to redistributing wealth. In The Road to Freedom, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur C. Brooks shows that this trend cannot be reversed through materialistic appeals about the economic efficiency of capitalism. Rather, free enterprise requires a moral defense rooted in the ideals of earned success, equality of opportunity, charity, and basic fairness. Brooks builds this defense and demonstrates how it is central to understanding the major policy issues facing America today. The future of the free enterprise system has become a central issue in our national debate, and Brooks offers a practical manual for defending it over the coming years. Both a moral manifesto and a prescription for concrete policy changes, The Road to Freedom will help Americans in all walks of life translate the philosophy of free enterprise into action, to restore both our nation's greatness and our own well-being in the process.

The Road to Freedom

The Road to Freedom
Title The Road to Freedom PDF eBook
Author John W. Morin
Publisher Wood 'N' Barnes Publishing
Pages 334
Release 2002
Genre Medical
ISBN 9781885473929

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A workbook for sex offenders incorporating the latest developments in relapse prevention training. It features the four-path R-P model and invites offenders, in an easy-to-read style, to examine their own approach to offending, addressing the high risk factors that trigger and maintain that approach. This book looks beyond the cognitive and behavioral linchpins of offending to the powerful emotional needs that energize deviant sex. The authors believe that only by learning to meet these needs in healthy ways can offenders attain the positive reinforcements that lead to maintaining important lifestyle changes. Newly-added sections address the role of polygraphy in sex offender treatment and the role of the Internet in sexual compulsivity.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
Title People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent PDF eBook
Author Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Pages 366
Release 2019-04-23
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 1324004223

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A Nobel prize winner challenges us to throw off the free market fundamentalists and reclaim our economy. We all have the sense that the American economy—and its government—tilts toward big business, but as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains in his new book, People, Power, and Profits, the situation is dire. A few corporations have come to dominate entire sectors of the economy, contributing to skyrocketing inequality and slow growth. This is how the financial industry has managed to write its own regulations, tech companies have accumulated reams of personal data with little oversight, and our government has negotiated trade deals that fail to represent the best interests of workers. Too many have made their wealth through exploitation of others rather than through wealth creation. If something isn’t done, new technologies may make matters worse, increasing inequality and unemployment. Stiglitz identifies the true sources of wealth and of increases in standards of living, based on learning, advances in science and technology, and the rule of law. He shows that the assault on the judiciary, universities, and the media undermines the very institutions that have long been the foundation of America’s economic might and its democracy. Helpless though we may feel today, we are far from powerless. In fact, the economic solutions are often quite clear. We need to exploit the benefits of markets while taming their excesses, making sure that markets work for us—the U.S. citizens—and not the other way around. If enough citizens rally behind the agenda for change outlined in this book, it may not be too late to create a progressive capitalism that will recreate a shared prosperity. Stiglitz shows how a middle-class life can once again be attainable by all. An authoritative account of the predictable dangers of free market fundamentalism and the foundations of progressive capitalism, People, Power, and Profits shows us an America in crisis, but also lights a path through this challenging time.

A Capitalism for the People

A Capitalism for the People
Title A Capitalism for the People PDF eBook
Author Luigi Zingales
Publisher Basic Books
Pages 337
Release 2014-02-11
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 0465038700

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Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment -- paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism -- on a country's economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better. In A Capitalism for the People, Zingales makes a forceful, philosophical, and at times personal argument that the roots of American capitalism are dying, and that the result is a drift toward the more corrupt systems found throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world. American capitalism, according to Zingales, grew in a unique incubator that provided it with a distinct flavor of competitiveness, a meritocratic nature that fostered trust in markets and a faith in mobility. Lately, however, that trust has been eroded by a betrayal of our pro-business elites, whose lobbying has come to dictate the market rather than be subject to it, and this betrayal has taken place with the complicity of our intellectual class. Because of this trend, much of the country is questioning -- often with great anger -- whether the system that has for so long buoyed their hopes has now betrayed them once and for all. What we are left with is either anti-market pitchfork populism or pro-business technocratic insularity. Neither of these options presents a way to preserve what the author calls "the lighthouse" of American capitalism. Zingales argues that the way forward is pro-market populism, a fostering of truly free and open competition for the good of the people -- not for the good of big business. Drawing on the historical record of American populism at the turn of the twentieth century, Zingales illustrates how our current circumstances aren't all that different. People in the middle and at the bottom are getting squeezed, while people at the top are only growing richer. The solutions now, as then, are reforms to economic policy that level the playing field. Reforms that may be anti-business (specifically anti-big business), but are squarely pro-market. The question is whether we can once again muster the courage to confront the powers that be.

The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom
Title The Road to Serfdom PDF eBook
Author John Blundell
Publisher
Pages 0
Release 2018
Genre
ISBN

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In the last years of World War II, Friedrich Hayek wrote 'The Road to Serfdom'. He warned the Allies that policy proposals which were being canvassed for the post-war world ran the risk of destroying the very freedom for which they were fighting. On the basis of 'as in war, so in peace', economists and others were arguing that the government should plan all economic activity. Such planning, Hayek argued, would be incompatible with liberty, and had been at the very heart of the movements that had established both communism and Nazism. On its publication in 1944, the book caused a sensation. Neither its British nor its American publisher could keep up with demand, owing to wartime paper rationing. Then, in 1945, Reader's Digest published 'The Road to Serfdom' as the condensed book in its April edition. For the first and still the only time, the condensed book was placed at the front of the magazine instead of the back. Hayek found himself a celebrity, addressing a mass market. The condensed edition was republished for the first time by the IEA in 1999 and has been reissued to meet the continuing demand for its enduringly relevant and accessible message.

The Vision of a Real Free Market Society

The Vision of a Real Free Market Society
Title The Vision of a Real Free Market Society PDF eBook
Author Marcellus Andrews
Publisher Taylor & Francis
Pages 106
Release 2017-03-27
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 1315390973

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Free market capitalism has created a divided American society. Conservative economic and social policy thinking drove the Right’s Project from 1980 to its collapse in 2008, leaving the world in ruins and fascism on the march. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society challenges the Left to create new forms of the market economy that promote efficiency and equality while permanently thwarting concentrated power. Many recent commentators have offered policy recommendations based on existing economic institutions. By contrast, this book calls for root-and-branch changes to the inherent structure of American capitalism. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society: Re-Imagining American Freedom presents a Left-egalitarian case for limited government that overcomes the failures of conservatism while rescuing economic justice from the weaknesses of tax and transfer liberalism. The book explains why the system fails so many Americans in so many different ways, and outlines how we can build a better economy that simultaneously promotes freedom and social justice while crippling the powers of America’s oligarchs. Exploring the idea of a left-wing case for strong but small government, the book makes the case for fundamental reforms that will lead to a truly free and fair society. This provocative book will be of great relevance to anyone with an interest in politics, philosophy or economics, and will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions concerning the prospects for combining justice with fairness in the modern world.