Real wages have barely increased for more than a decade. Banks have had to be bailed out, and many still exist on a form of state life support. Growth has stalled, taxes are at 70-year highs, yet governments are still bankrupt. Unless you happen to be part of a tiny plutocracy made up mostly of tech entrepreneurs and financiers, there has rarely been a point, at least since the nadir of the mid-1970s, when the economic system seemed beset by quite so many challenges as it is today. The left has smartly stepped into the intellectual space that has been created with a series of well-timed polemics, which, while they vary in precise analysis and on solutions, have at least one thing in common. They argue that the system is fundamentally broken, and it will take radical action to fix it. And, in fairness, they have a point, even if it is not quite the one they think they have identified.
Joseph Stiglitz’s The Road to Freedom is the most heavyweight of the three books under review – as you might expect from a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, and a former chief economist at the World Bank. He makes the case for ‘progressive capitalism’ – what the rest of us might, more simply, refer to as the Labour party manifesto. The book is designed primarily for people who worry that a speech by the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves might be a little too exciting for their tastes. It is a blueprint for technocratic social democracy – think Gordon Brown on roller skates – with lots of pledges of big-spending government programmes to humanise raw capitalism, and global systems of taxation and welfare to tame its animal spirits.
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