John Cassidy
In the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, when there was no vaccine in sight and more than a thousand people who had contracted the virus were dying each day in the United States, Joseph Stiglitz, the economics professor and Nobel laureate, was isolating with his wife at home, on the Upper West Side. Stiglitz, who is now eighty-one, was a high-risk individual, and he followed the government’s guidelines on masking and social distancing scrupulously. Not everyone did, of course, and on the political right there were complaints that the mask mandate, in particular, was an unjustified infringement on individual freedom. Stiglitz strongly disagreed. “I thought it was very clear that this was an example where one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom,” he told me recently. “Wearing a mask was a very little infringement on one person’s freedom, and not wearing a mask was potentially a large infringement on others.”
It also struck Stiglitz, who had served as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, that the experience of the pandemic could provide an opportunity for a wide-ranging examination of the question of freedom and unfreedom, which he had been thinking about from an economic perspective for many years. The result is a new book, “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” in which he seeks to reclaim the concept of freedom for liberals and progressives. “Freedom is an important value that we do and ought to cherish, but it is more complex and more nuanced than the Right’s invocation,” he writes. “The current conservative reading of what freedom means is superficial, misguided, and ideologically motivated. The Right claims to be the defender of freedom, but I’ll show that the way they define the word and pursue it has led to the opposite result, vastly reducing the freedoms of most citizens.”
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