#Neoliberalism#Economy#PoliticalEconomy#Freedom: "As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”"
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