Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz knows what he speaks and writes about.
Photo: Picture Alliance / DPA | Ernesto Arias
Capitalism has two faces. One swears onto the market that regulates everything in the best way if you only let it and the state does not intervene. This view is particularly connected to two names: Friedrich August Hayek and Milton Friedman. In 1974 and 1976 they were awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. The other face presents Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University in New York, who also received this award from the Swedish Academy in 2001. In his new book “The way to freedom”, he calls for an economy for a just society. It is an argumentative exchange of blows with the representatives of neoliberalism. In the past, Stiglitz demonstrates market capitalism as present, blatant violations of the principle of fairness, morality and efficiency. This reads exciting and is written with combative verve and yet, given the market power of the “social” media that is dominated today, accompanied by doubts about the enforceability of his noble ideas.
What is a “just society”? Stiglitz looks from an ideologically neutral position “behind the veil of not knowledge”, which the American philosopher and also Nobel Prize winner John Rawls invented to enable a decision free of his own interests. From this wait, all “trade offs” must be weighed on whose freedom can or should be circumcised. Any expansion of freedom means restriction for freedoms of others. According to criteria of justice, necessity and morality, the negotiation process must take place. This requires the expansion of democratic structures and reducing the dominant power less economic bosses and their influence on political decisions based on it.
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Especially in the case of “externalities”, i.e. events that affect the markets from outside, the regulating intervention of the state is necessary. Stiglietz does not trust the so -called self -healing of the market. As an example, he leads the necessary state intervention in the 2008 crisis, as states had to support the stumbling banks from their own fault. The taxpayers paid for this.
Even during the Covid pandemic, the state had to act to protect millions of people. Thanks to scientific research in publicly financed institutes, effective vaccines could be obtained, but the profits from their sale were collected by the pharmaceutical companies. The state would have to skim these oversets from pandemic to finance further research and investments in socially relevant areas. One should not leave the decision to the market.
Similarly, Stiglitz judges the greatest challenge (externality) of the present, the climate crisis. He goes to court with the agents of climate change, names the super -rich companies primarily from the mineral oil sector and from the strongly flourishing fake news industry in the supposedly social media. The state should also intervene and set barriers to the unregulated market mechanisms. Because “if there is an excessive power ballation in the profit -oriented private sector, the rich and powerful companies, regardless of the formal structures, will have an inappropriately great influence in the public sphere,” says Stiglitz.
The US economist can work without damage to its efficiency and justice with a scientific research acting with informed citizens and a pluralistic media landscape. This applies not only to national economies, but also globally, the former chief economist of the World Bank is convinced.
Stiglitz has also worked in and for developing countries and knows about the “small pressure” in the trade contracts between rich and poor states. The USA and China, but also the EU and other “rich” countries, behave in a way that is no longer just neoliberal, but even neocolonialist. The raw material agreement between the United States and Ukraine, which has recently signed so spectacularly signed, should be no exception.
Donald Trump, the “America First” man, is alongside Hayek and Friedman Addressat of flaming charges by the author, who breaks a lance for the just balancing freedom. An important sentence in his book: “Power relationships are of central importance for the understanding of growing inequality and the widespread perception that the system is” prestige “.” These would “play an important role in the disappointment with democracy and institutions as well as the increase in populism”.
Joseph Stiglitz: the way to freedom. Economics for a just society. A. d. Engl. V. Thorsten Schmidt. Siedler, 477 pages, born, 28 €.
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