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Serfdom and Freedom, part 1
May. 31st, 2024 07:40 pmI was intrigued recently by a mention of Joseph Stiglitz's The Road to Freedom, said to be a rebuttal to the neoliberal bible, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Intrigued enough to want to read it, except that would mean having to read The Road to Serfdom first to really know what Stiglitz was rebutting.
Well, there I was at Powell's a few days ago intending to spend down a birthday gift certificate, and I wound up picking up both. And like I did with The Wealth of Nations, I feel the need to blog my way through them so that those of you who don't want to actually read them don't have to.
The first piece of good news is that both books combined look to be shorter than The Wealth of Nations. In fact, there's even less to the Hayek than it first appears...
( Introductions, and plenty of them )
I should note that I was taught in history class that Nazi rule came about because the reparations for World War I humiliated and financially crippled Germany, and that plus the general worldwide malaise of the 1930s made the German people so miserable that they were ready to embrace a charismatic demagogue who told them that they were actually the best people, and started providing convenient scapegoats to unite against. Economic ideology is just irrelevant to the story. So I don't think Hayek is going to be convincing me of anything, but it'll still be interesting to see where this goes.
Well, there I was at Powell's a few days ago intending to spend down a birthday gift certificate, and I wound up picking up both. And like I did with The Wealth of Nations, I feel the need to blog my way through them so that those of you who don't want to actually read them don't have to.
The first piece of good news is that both books combined look to be shorter than The Wealth of Nations. In fact, there's even less to the Hayek than it first appears...
( Introductions, and plenty of them )
I should note that I was taught in history class that Nazi rule came about because the reparations for World War I humiliated and financially crippled Germany, and that plus the general worldwide malaise of the 1930s made the German people so miserable that they were ready to embrace a charismatic demagogue who told them that they were actually the best people, and started providing convenient scapegoats to unite against. Economic ideology is just irrelevant to the story. So I don't think Hayek is going to be convincing me of anything, but it'll still be interesting to see where this goes.
