Somewhere America lost its way. Behind the scenes lobby groups control regulation and twist it for their own purposes; trade deals are stacked against workers; the media cannot be trusted; democracy risks becoming nothing more than a sham contest between oligarchs.
This gloomy portrait of the US is painted by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his latest book, where he sets out a progressive agenda that he hopes can “save capitalism from itself”. It could even, he suggests, provide a consensus platform for the Democrats in the 2020 effort to unseat Donald Trump.
The rightwing populists, including the US president, are correct in much of their diagnosis, Stiglitz writes. The system really is rigged and companies have profited over the past 30 years not from innovation and progress but from exploitation and monopoly power. “The disparity between what was promised and what happened was glaring,” he writes of the period.