Instructive, insightful, but lacks vision.

Learned a lot of things, but says mere tweaking isn't enough and only offers tweak fixes.

Overall Stiglitz does a great job at diagnosing the ills of markets and offers some good ideas but lacks an overarching vision of the better world he says is possible. He says mere tweaks and reforms won't be enough, but all of his solutions are just that. There is no true ideological break with the economic structures of property power that shape our modern legal framework, which many argue, such as Thomas Piketty, who Stiglitz refers to a few times in this book, is the root problem that inevitably leads to the situation Stiglitz diagnoses in this book. Rather than breaking with the structure of the supremacy of property rights like Piketty does, Stiglitz merely breaks with trickle down economics, as if for him the world before the rise of Thatcher and Reagan didn't create the conditions that inevitably created neoliberal movements, as if we could go back in time (although with some distinct advancements and differences) without ending up in the same place again. Whereas Piketty goes to the root, he goes all the way down to the cultural and historic origins of our newfound devotion to property rights and exposes it as an unnecessary and destructive legal order that leads to everything Stiglitz is trying to attack with his proposed reforms. Stiglitz, perhaps naively, wants to tame the beast, Piketty wants to kill it.

I think the new worker-controlled order proposed by Piketty, with Stiglitz's proposed legal control of markets would make for a remarkable world.

Again, Stiglitz is insightful and visibly brilliant, I just think his own contradictions undermine the viability of the solutions he offers on their own. You'll still learn a ton about economics and modern American history with this high quality book that I strongly recommend. But you'll want to complement this with some Piketty and Richard Wolff to cement a proper new vision of what is to be done.

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