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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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FREE MARKET
The History of an Idea
Free Market is an intellectual history of the free market, from ancient Rome to the twenty-first century. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand itand to develop new economic concepts to face today's challenges.
Free market ideology is due for a serious reappraisal, and Soll is the just person to do it. He's a world-renowned leader in the history of financial accounting and public finance. He advised the Greek government and the European Commission on the Greek debt crisis in the mid-2010s, and has advised organizations and individuals including: NATO, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and the Kazarian Foundation for Public Finance. Free Market has already received some excellent blurbs, from Lawrence Summers, and David Bell, included below.
Free Market looks at how the idea of free markets became so powerful, why it succeeded, why it has failed so spectacularly, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. The collapse of the Soviet Union was supposed to lead to a story of the success of free markets. However, over the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major driver of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has proved very clearly to be untrue.
Contrary to the popular narratives driven by Friedman's ideas, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But eighteenth-century thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed, and an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has since refused to follow its own precepts.
Jacob Soll is University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History, and Accounting at the University of Southern California. The author of The Reckoning and The Information Master, Soll is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the MacArthur "Genius" grant. He lives in Los Angeles.
Free Market looks at how the idea of free markets became so powerful, why it succeeded, why it has failed so spectacularly, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. The collapse of the Soviet Union was supposed to lead to a story of the success of free markets. However, over the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major driver of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has proved very clearly to be untrue.
Contrary to the popular narratives driven by Friedman's ideas, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But eighteenth-century thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed, and an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has since refused to follow its own precepts.
Jacob Soll is University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History, and Accounting at the University of Southern California. The author of The Reckoning and The Information Master, Soll is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the MacArthur "Genius" grant. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Book
Published 2022-09-06 by Basic Books |