The Road to Freedom Quotes

“One person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom. Externalities are pervasive, and the management of these externalities—including environmental devastation—that are inevitably the direct by-products of unfettered markets requires public actions, including regulations. Indeed, any game needs rules and regulations. I’ve delineated here the need for regulations to curb the agglomeration of power and the exploitation of some by others.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society

“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.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society

“What matters is a person’s opportunity set—the set of options she has available.7 From an economist’s perspective, this is the only thing that matters. Her opportunity set determines, indeed defines, her freedom to act.8 Any reduction in the scope of actions she can undertake is a loss of freedom.9 The language used to describe an expansion or contraction of the opportunity set makes no difference.10, 11 It makes no difference whether one induces someone to behave in a particular way by incentivizing him through rewards or punishing him through fines, even though we champion the former as “noncoercive” (praising economic systems that design clever incentive systems that induce the desired behavior) and castigate the latter as “coercive.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society