The following has been excerpted, and edited for brevity, from the reissue of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, first published in 2024 and newly reissued.
Since this book was first published in April 2024, the themes I raise in this book have only become more relevant.
As I explain in the original Preface, one of my intentions in writing this book was to reclaim the freedom agenda for progressives. Conservatives, who tried to make it their own over the past decades, failed to understand the very nature of freedom, often trampling on it even as they proclaimed they were championing it.
I thought these issues might become central to the US presidential campaign just then heating up. And indeed, for a moment they did. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris chose Beyoncé’s song, “Freedom,” as her campaign anthem. At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, when Harris was nominated, thousands of signs were held up that read “Freedom.” Governor Tim Walz’s acceptance speech for vice president seemed to take a page from the same book: “Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations—free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.”
But the campaign took a different turn. The election was about change: a feeling among large factions of the population that something had gone wrong in the country and Harris was part of the “establishment” that was responsible. She couldn’t or wouldn’t distance herself sufficiently from President Joe Biden, or the succession of presidents of both parties who had advanced the neoliberal agenda over the past half century—with its promise of trickle-down economics. As it turned out, we had trickle-up economics. More and more of our society’s money seemed to go in the pockets of the few people at the very top of the wealth ladder.
As this book relates, the average American had much to complain about: a failed economic agenda that saw slowing growth and rising inequality in all its dimensions. The rich were able to live a life of freedom while the rest were struggling to get by. Neoliberalism, by its very name, sounds like it is promising a “new liberalism, free from government restraints,” but what it delivered was greater freedom for banks and corporations to take advantage of us and less freedom for most citizens to live up to their potential.
I present in this book a vision of an alternative world. It’s a comprehensive agenda that I believe will enhance the freedom of most people globally. I was hopeful that Harris would win and that we would move toward that agenda. I worried that if we didn’t move fast enough the discontent would remain. I worried that the discontent was so great that, in spite of the demonstrated failures of the first Trump administration, he would get reelected. And even if he didn’t, if the underlying problems in the US were not adequately addressed, in the not too distant future another Trump-like demagogue would arise to take advantage of that discontent.
Harris lost. The discontent was greater, the information ecosystem more polluted with mis- and disinformation, than I had realized.
In the subsequent months, it became clear that the issue of freedom was even more relevant. Americans and citizens around the globe saw we were in a new world, with an expansion of freedoms for a few oligarchs and a contraction for almost everyone else. The Republican party showed it had no spine; it gave up long-standing principles overnight. A keystone of the party for almost a half century had been “free trade.” But when President Trump proposed the highest tariffs in almost a century the Republican party went along with barely a murmur. Those around the world couldn’t help but note the irony, because for decades the US had lectured other countries about the virtues of free trade. In its role as the only member of the International Monetary Fund that had veto power, the US had demanded that countries seeking assistance in times of crisis open their markets to foreign trade. Evidently, three-quarters of a century of lectures hadn’t sunk in. America had often been accused of hypocrisy. Here, America (or at least the Trump administration) seemed almost proud of its 180-degree reversal.
The U.S. dropped out of the Paris Agreement, which was designed to manage climate change, for a second time; oil companies were given a freer hand to pollute, taking away the freedom of the rest of humanity to breathe clean air. I write in these pages that Isaiah Berlin had said freedom for the wolves often meant death for the sheep. Freedom of the oil and coal companies to pollute literally meant death for many people with asthma. The freedom of corporate behemoths was expanded, as all of us, including polluters, lost a more important freedom: to live in a healthy world. We faced a real fear of increasingly rapid climate change, with increasingly frequent extreme climate events, with devastating consequences for lives and livelihoods.
These and other stances of the Trump administration illustrated so many of the themes that I raise in this book and make them even more poignant.
First, on the meaning of freedom. Cutbacks in education, food stamps, and health care that were a central feature of what Trump described as the “Big Beautiful Bill” of 2025 (and others described as a sure way for America to be downgraded from a AAA rating on its debt to a BBB rating) would ensure that more Americans would not have the freedom to live up to their potential. Even the Republican Congress’s Congressional Budget Office noted how regressive the bill was—with tax cuts for billionaires being paid by health care cuts for the poorest Americans; this, in a country with the shortest lifespan of any major advanced country and greater health inequalities.
Second, on trade-offs. The expansion of the freedom of corporations to exploit others often came at the loss of freedom for others. The Trump administration trumped the freedom of the exploiters over that of the exploited. Any just society would do the opposite. And of course, a society where “rent-seekers”—those who gain at the expense of others, whether through market power, exploitation of information asymmetries and imperfections, or individual vulnerabilities—is not going to be a prosperous society marked by general well-being.
Third, on cooperation. Some have claimed that the distinctive attribute of humans is their ability to cooperate. Doing things together can achieve far more than doing them alone. Cooperation may sometimes entail an element of coercion to avoid free-rider problems. This is a voluntary coercion because it’s clear that in binding one’s hand, one—and everyone else—can be better off. I describe here how taxes enable us to make collective investments (including in basic research) that have made us all better off, including protecting us against Covid-19. What Trump did in his first year in office of his second term was designed to polarize our society and undermine the ability to cooperate. Most importantly, there was a massive attack on science and universities.
These attacks are related to one of the other themes central to this book: the increases in standards of living and life expectancy enjoyed by people in the advanced countries over the past quarter of a millennium (and more recently in much of the rest of the world) are a result of Enlightenment values, the notion that through reason, through science, we can expand our understanding of the world and develop better ways to cooperate. These are the foundations on which the enormous increases in standards of living have been based. Trump’s attacks on science and reason, were they to prove successful, would be a major defeat for Enlightenment values and the central idea that progress is possible. The adverse economic consequences should be obvious, as are the political consequences. The polarization that Trump has engendered undermines the very possibility of societal cooperation.
Trump’s trampling of democratic norms has made us realize how fragile democracies really are.
I describe in the final part of the book a vision of progressive capitalism—or a rejuvenated social democracy—that might be the basis of sustainable democratic development and growth. An important argument in earlier parts of the book is that neoliberal capitalism was self-devouring; it was neither economically nor politically sustainable. And contrary to the claims of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, their version of “economic freedom” actually undermined democracy. I am afraid that the flawed neoliberal attempt to expand freedom has had just the opposite effect and given rise to a personality like Trump, who appears to have little understanding of, or respect for, either reasoning or the pursuit of truth; and to a society in which a significant minority seems to embrace authoritarian populism and seems unfazed by the apparent dismantling of democracy and the associated losses of economic and political freedoms.
By contrast, the vision of progressive capitalism I present is one that simultaneously strengthens individual and collective political and economic freedoms and well-being. Key to that is the prevention of the agglomeration of power, including checks and balances not just within government but within society. A free press and academic freedom are at the core. It is no wonder that a central part of Trump’s agenda undermining democratic principles has been to attack universities, science, and the media—all the institutions that attempt to ascertain the truth as objectively as is humanly possible.
Were I writing the book today, I would not only have commented more on the fragility of democracy and the need for societal checks and balances, I would have devoted more time to the central question of how to make our democracy more robust. We had laws that we thought would protect our universities from the kinds of actions that Trump has taken. We thought we had a rule of law. But Trump has trampled on the rule of law almost with impunity.
Internationally, much the same has occurred. As chapter 12 outlines, our system of international economic law is imperfect. But we now realize that an imperfect rule of law may be better than no rule of law at all. Around the world, the US has lost its “soft power,” the influence it exerts because of the respect others have for us. The US has wielded its power chaotically and in ways that in the long run will be to our detriment—even putting aside how the US trade deficit is likely to increase and the role of the dollar as a reserve currency will decrease. As the US attempts to extract for itself more of the surplus of global supply chains, violating international laws and norms, other countries see it as an unreliable and undesirable trade partner—meaning they will pay us less for our goods and services and demand more from us when we buy theirs.
I’ve come to a new understanding of how fascism works, how democracies die, and how authoritarian leaders come to power. I write in this book about how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about freedom from fear—and it is fear that I see being used pervasively now. Trump seeks to intimidate. He got lawyers who had done nothing wrong to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars in “pro bono work.” He got universities, like my own, to capitulate—paying hundreds of millions of dollars, it seems, out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t. I see students and faculty afraid to protest even in favor of academic freedom! Living with fear is not fun, and living with fear will be corrosive to our economy, our polity, and our society.
Neoliberal capitalism was criticized for its “short-termism,” its focus on today rather than the long run. But the illiberal thuggery that seems to be replacing it in the US is even worse. It has attacked the very engines of economic growth. To attack science in a twenty-first century economy based on technology is self-destructive. To auction off seats at a dinner table with the president is blatant corruption. We’ve entered the world of a medieval bazaar, where we replace the rule of law with a question: How much will you give me or the government for this or that regulation, for this or that exception from a regulation, for this or that tariff on foreign competitors, or for this or that reduction in tariffs? There are good reasons that economies based on such haggling didn’t prosper and that economies based on the rule of law did. I am afraid that the US is about to learn this lesson. It will be another data point to prove an already well-established principle.
Thus, two years after the publication of this book I see it as more important than ever, but also as just the beginning of a deeper and ever-evolving enquiry into how we preserve and extend freedom. This is, of course, not a new question. It has been asked across the ages and must be answered in every generation. For our generation and the generations to come, we face the harrowing task of figuring out how to save and restore our democratic society, and only then, how to improve it.
Excerpted from The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. Copyright (c) 2024 by Joseph E. Stiglitz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
