NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Flickr/Kevin Case. Some rights reserved.On May 12, Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt Institute (a progressive thinktank of which Stiglitz is the chief economist) released a 100 page-long report, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity. US Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also spoke at the report’s launch, suggesting that the document could become an important political manifesto for the American Left.
The report is slickly designed, with inset ‘definition boxes’ and innovative graphics adorning the green-and-white pages, and a video of the launch looms large on the report’s website. And it has received considerable attention, being covered in the New York Times, Slate, and Time, with many journalists speculating that it may foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s economic thinking, since Clinton has used Stiglitz as an economic advisor.
But what does Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy actually say? Are any of its proposals novel or original? And what does the report tell us about the state of current progressive economic thinking?
