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People, Power, and Profits
Stiglitz's 2019 manifesto for progressive capitalism — the constructive sequel to his critique of contemporary inequality, laying out the institutional architecture required to redirect market economies toward broadly shared prosperity, with direct implications for the AI transition he would elaborate in subsequent work.
People, Power, and Profits is Stiglitz's attempt to answer the constructive question his critical work had raised. If contemporary inequality is a policy outcome that could be chosen differently, what would the alternative look like? The book's answer is progressive capitalism: market economies governed by institutions that correct market failures, distribute gains broadly, and preserve democratic accountability. The framework rejects both unregulated market capitalism (which produces the concentration he had documented in The Price of Inequality) and state socialism (which produces its own pathologies of concentration and inefficiency). The middle path is market economies operating within robust institutional frameworks that channel productive activity toward broad welfare. Applied to AI, the framework provides the specific institutional architecture the transition requires — the research, education, labor, and antitrust policies that would convert the productivity multiplier into broadly shared prosperity rather than concentrated extraction.
