A ‘superficial’ and ‘misguided’ version of freedom has captured the American right. Joseph Stiglitz considers the alternatives

Review: The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society – Joseph Stiglitz (Allen Lane)

“Freedom is a core human value,” writes Joseph Stiglitz in his new book The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. “But many of freedom’s advocates seldom ask what the idea really means. Freedom for whom? What happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s?”

Reflecting on the famous slogan of American jurist James Otis – “taxation without representation is tyranny” – Stiglitz observes with concern that many on the contemporary US right seem to have arrived at the view that “taxation with representation is also tyranny”.

This type of thinking has increased over the decades, extending from Ronald Reagan’s claim that “markets are the solution, government is the problem” to Ted Cruz’s call to abolish entire government departments – including the IRS, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy – and Ron Paul’s assertion that “the more government spends the more freedom is lost”.

Something, argues Stiglitz, has gone awry with the conception of freedom here.

In The Road to Freedom, Stiglitz critiques what he sees as the “superficial” and “misguided” interpretation of freedom that has gained ascendancy in the period of neoliberal globalisation. This view, he says, is held in common by the assortment of conservatives, libertarians and other right-of-centre people that make up the US right.

Focusing on the US, he argues that the way the idea has been defined and pursued has led to the opposite of “meaningful freedom”. It has failed “to give due recognition to how interdependent people are in a modern economy” and led to a vast reduction in the “freedoms of most citizens”.

Thanks Complicated Music Licensing Schemes: ‘Alan Wake’ Updated To Remove Bowie Song From Credits

Here we go again. For those of us that view video games as a vital and still emerging form of culture and art, one of the more frustrating aspects of the industry is how music is licensed for game soundtracks and how that licensing complicates games as they age. For instance, we saw this play out earlier this year with an aged Spec Ops: The Line game getting delisted from Steam entirely, much to the surprise of both the public and the director of the game. The culprit? Well, the licensing for the soundtrack in the game had expired.

Now, think about what this means if you place this in the context of preservation of culture. Soundtracks are obviously important in entertainment mediums. Music can make or break a film or TV show. Video games are no different. I fell in love with the Mass Effect series long ago, for example, and a huge part of it was the atmospheric draw of the soundtrack.

But as important as the music is, as I can feel the copyright protectionists out there nodding along with me, so too is the cultural output that makes use of it to create a whole new piece of art. Take the hit game Alan Wake from 2010 as an example. Alongside an excellent original score, the soundtrack also features several licensed songs, most notably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Or, it did, that is, since the original release will have that song stripped out of it in an update due to a licensing expiration.