As Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia professor and Nobel laureate, touts his new book “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” he has a two-fold message: The American Dream is a myth and freedom isn’t free. And especially when it comes to Gen Z, the generation that shook the political landscape with a protest movement headquartered steps from Stiglitz’s office, he tells Fortune he’s “had a lot of discussions with various people trying to understand what’s going on.”
Stiglitz says the protest movement gripping his institution and many others “does hit home” and recalled his own history as a civil-rights protester in the 1960s. “This may sound hard to believe,” he says, “but I was there in the march in Washington in August 1963, with Martin Luther King. And I was there when he gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” This had an influence on his thinking as a young man, he says, and “an enormous impact on the direction of our country, at least for a while.”
