The road to freedom: economics and the good society | LSE Event 

Freedom without constraints is counterproductive! I will give another example to illustrate what Pr. Joseph Stiglitz wants to explain very well here: imagine that a conductor of his automobile on a perfect road in the sense that no friction and thereby no force of resistance, the surface's road will apply to his automobile weels . The result will be that these weels will patina and the automobile will not be able to go nowhere...and stick in its initial position Best regards M.Ali From Marrakech

Thank goodness for the clear-thinking, visionary Joseph Stiiglitz

Thank you for sharing.

Wonderful to bring these critical thinkers and their ideas to a wider public audience. Lets work together to develop the more open, critical university.

Thanks for uploading this 😊

I find it quite mad that the host, Professor Mary Kaldor, is the daughter of another amazing economist that gave us the Kaldor-Hicks principle. Small world.

I was hoping that Professor Stiglitz would have addressed Fractional Reserve Banking, which to my mind, is a major reason capitalism has gone bad. On top of that the Feds take it upon themselves, a few wise people there, to FIX the PRICE of debt. My humble suggestion, go to full reserve banking and stop fixing prices.

One of the best universities in the world, and both here and their audio podcasts cannot figure out how to manage sound, in this case, either the viewer couldn't hear the questions or Stiglitz couldn't hear them. It's baffling how such an institution can be so poor at something rather simple.

Well syndicate project..🎉for your book ..a little I listening ..I try to understand what's different from other book ..you said ..do what *you* likes to do ..and then we are free..les self fishing....thx

At the beginning, why the camera focus on the Lady during hours ? It is unconfortable for her and unuseful for us.

Economics science exists for the good of society but not necessarily give freedom but the hard reality of existentialism.

You good intention well lead to distraction of society

Restrictions because of pollution well lead to unemployment and it will decrease efficiency. Its the entrepreneurs who came up with new way to produce goods sustainable goods and the regulations that you argue will destroy entrepreneurship.

Think our emotions come in the way of determining morality in the definition of a good society. We also should not assume things about what other eminent economists might have meant in what they had written or said. In this regard, Friedman did say that businesses should try to maximize profits for shareholders, but don’t think he meant profit maximization is to be achieved at the expense of ethics. He always maintained that ethics is the responsibility of the individual(s) in question. Now on to your examples. First and foremost, taking away 100 or 200 billion USD from Bezos is not going to motivate many who need to be more responsible for their lives. Why should they try to earn more if someone’s going to take away a big chunk of it. Secondly, redistributing the 100 billion USD across people with low incomes is just not going to make them better off either. Temporarily, we may alleviate some of their challenges. Plenty of examples demonstrate that people being helped financially still end up in completely different economic circumstances after some years. Not sure we can go into someones’s mind and change it for that person. Long and short, Milton Friedman was by far and away a person full of morals and very unassuming. It’s presumptuous of Professor Stiglitz to make distinctions in capitalism such as progressive (which he claims is his way) and unfettered (which he claims is Friedman’s). Nonsense at best. There is only one kind. It is that which arises when the individual in the society is given importance and, more importantly, the individual is allowed a sense of freedom that allows the individual to not only think and act freely, but do so with a great deal of responsibility and compassion. Friedman has made a particular reference to the 2008 banking collapse, calling it the work of Clinton who in the name of helping out the poorer sections of American society looked the other way when bankers were selling mortgages to clients who had no means of paying back the banks at all. Friedman disapproved of what Clinton did. It was by no means according to Friedman an act of compassion or anything to do with the freedom of the individual, when bankers completely deprived clients of the opportunity to think freely and realize the amount of liability on themselves these mortgages would bring. The bankers achieved this by robbing off clients with all sorts of half-baked convoluted logic presented with products such as interest-free or decreasing-principal mortgages. I cannot imagine a Nobel Laureate such as Professor Stiglitz would go to such lengths as to create in his audience a sense of remorse or guilt by painting the corporate governance laws of the 1970’s (that ensured businesses were obligated to maximize value for their shareholders) as evil. How different is the situation of shareholders providing corporates with shareholder money any different from banks providing loans to regular people like Professor Stiglitz or any of us? Would Professor Stiglitz in the same vein say it is not correct for people who have taken loans to focus on paying back the banks first as best as possible before spending away on other things they liked? What kind of convoluted logic and a sense or responsibility is Professor Stiglitz preaching? You cannot have a diff sense of morality or responsibility just because a plan-borrowing individual is replaced with a shareholder money borrowing corporate entity. It is the responsibility of either to ensure that the entities (banks or shareholders) from whom they borrowed money are given full attention first.

problems with the leftists: 1. charity (altruism) and voluntary action help to solve all problems 2. people trust each other and do not kill each other without any safeguards and laws 3. human nature is not largely selfish; there is no invisible hand this is disproven by the current anarchic world order without government: - foreign aid is much less than 1% of a country's gdp, - people just sit on the fence and watch crimes in palestine, rwanda, myanmar. - you need a draft to get soldiers to fight in a war. - rich people pay very little of their wealth and incomes in charity; philantropy doesn't work. - merciless debt collection by IMF in other words, you need cameras, police, laws, taxation, judicial systems to coerce individuals to behave nicely and justly and make a society work.

What broght us here Socialism?😅😅

As brilliant an economist as Joseph Stiglitz is, he is truly awful at erm, urgh, public speaking.