Talks & Entertainment

In The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, Joseph E. Stiglitz—Nobel Prize-winning economist, chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, and former chief economist of the World Bank—dissects America’s current economic system and the political ideology that created it, laying bare their twinned failure.  

According to Stiglitz, “free” and unfettered markets have only succeeded in delivering a series of crises: the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, and the crisis of inequality—exploiting consumers, workers, and the environment alike. While a small portion of the population has amassed considerable wealth, wages for most people have stagnated. Such failures have fed populist movements that believe being free means abandoning any obligations citizens have to one another, posing a real threat to true economic and political freedom.  

The Road to Freedom draws on the work of contemporary philosophers to explain 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 if we are to create an innovative society in which everyone can flourish.  

Stiglitz will be in conversation with Timothy Noah, a staff writer for the New Republic and a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly. He’s the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, and writes the newsletter “Backbencher” on substack.

Book signing to follow.