WORK
The Road to Freedom
Stiglitz's 2024 philosophical defense of progressive capitalism — a direct response to Hayek's The Road to Serfdom arguing that genuine freedom requires not minimal government but the institutional infrastructure that enables citizens to exercise meaningful choice, a framework now essential for thinking about freedom in the AI-augmented economy.
The Road to Freedom is Stiglitz's most philosophically ambitious book, taking on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 The Road to Serfdom and the libertarian tradition it founded. Hayek argued that government intervention in markets produces a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Stiglitz argues the opposite: unregulated markets produce concentrations of private power that undermine freedom more thoroughly than any democratic government, and genuine freedom requires the institutional infrastructure — education, healthcare, economic security, information integrity — that enables citizens to exercise meaningful choice. The book's central move is to reclaim freedom as a progressive value, demonstrating that the libertarian conception of freedom as absence of government constraint is both philosophically confused and empirically inadequate. Applied to AI, the framework provides the ethical foundation for the institutional interventions the transition requires — not as restrictions on freedom but as the conditions that make freedom possible.
