April 2025
“We have to decide whether the enhancement of a poorer person’s ability to live up to her potential and expand her freedom is more or less valuable than the associated restraint on the freedom of a rich person to buy another Rolex watch, a larger yacht, a bigger mansion.” Joseph Stiglitz
Essentially, I would call The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024) a socialist manifesto, but Joseph Stiglitz, a renowned American academic economist, calls his ideas “progressive capitalism” or a “rejuvenated social democracy” — he does not, for example, advocate for an entirely publicly owned economy. His focus is on the US where an individualistic approach to capitalism is particularly entrenched. He shows how political and economic freedom are inseparable.
Stiglitz’s central thesis is that ‘freedom’ — political and economic — is impossible for those who struggle to make ends meet, or even for those who spend most of their energy in making money, since they too are bound to materialism. He utterly refutes the view of the ‘Right’, or Neoliberalism, that “the more the government spends the more [individual] freedom is lost”. He traces the failure of Neoliberalism leading up to the economic crash of 2008, saying that it had resulted in a belief in “unfettered markets”, which, in turn, led to greater social and economic inequality, and had “prepared the ground for populism”, along with a ‘strong’ leader like Donald Trump. (The book refers to Donald Trump’s first term as US President but it was written before he was elected as President for a second term.)
The extreme example of a non-equal society that Stiglitz offers was a society based on slavery — only slave owners had any kind of freedom (though we might question the reality of that ‘freedom’ today).
‘Progressive capitalism’ accepts that a society with a “mild form of coercion” — imposing tax and regulations for the public good — will bring about well-being and freedom for a greater number of people. Freedom, after all, is not possible for those “living on the edge”, who have no freedom of action because they have to be preoccupied with trying — and often failing — to meet their minimal daily material needs. Stiglitz quotes Adam Smith: “When the regulation therefore is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”
Stiglitz laments how democracy in the US has declined in recent years: “Voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and a host of other anti-democratic actions by Republican extremists have put American democracy in danger. … The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great.”
Stiglitz is particularly concerned with the climate crisis and the crucial but unmet need for international cooperation because of a general refusal to consider the wider, general good.
In the end, Stiglitz asserts, well-being should be at centre of society’s agenda rather than the sole focus being on economic growth. This could be a lesson for the new Labour government in the UK whose main ‘mantram’ on being elected was “Growth, growth, growth”.
Individual freedom
There is another approach to ‘freedom’ familiar to readers of Share International: that of Krishnamurti . Once he had been ‘found’ in India as a bedraggled child, and brought up in the West by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, he clearly had no need to be concerned with economic or political freedom. On the material plane he was always looked after and took meticulous care of his dress and grooming.
He spoke about psychological freedom, absolute freedom of consciousness which has no need of — is free from — thought or belief. And that the way to a free society is for each individual to change, inwardly and instantly, with a complete and non-thinking awareness. Although Krishnamurti himself didn’t use the word ‘spiritual’ it was a spiritual transformation that he espoused — an awareness that could not be taught, and that did not depend on society. He believed that society can only be changed through individual transformation.
Can we imagine that such a transformation could be achieved in a society that lacks political and economic freedom? Perhaps we all have a responsibility for both individual and societal change. Freedom begins with each of us, alone. But we are also a part of the world, the society around us, where we also need to act.
