What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

Robert B. Reich: The Next Economy and America’s Future

In partnership with:
Date and time
Friday, September 24, 2010

Public policy expert and former US Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich takes us into the aftermath of the economic crisis with his book *Aftershock: The Next Economy and America′s Future*. When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living. Persuasively and straightforwardly, Reich reveals how precarious our situation still is. The last time in American history when wealth was so highly concentrated at the top—indeed, when the top 1 percent of the population was paid 23 percent of the nation’s income—was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Such a disparity leads to ever greater booms followed by ever deeper busts. Reich’s account of where we are headed over the next decades reveals the essential truth about our economy that is driving our politics and shaping our future. With keen insight, he shows us how the middle class lacks enough purchasing power to buy what the economy can produce and has adopted coping mechanisms that have a negative impact on their quality of life; how the rich use their increasing wealth to speculate; and how an angrier politics emerges as more Americans conclude that the game is rigged for the benefit of a few. Unless this trend is reversed, the Great Recession will only be repeated.

Robert_Reich.jpg
Robert B. Reich is professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He last served in government as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His articles have appeared in *The New Yorker*, *The Atlantic Monthly*, *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, and *The Wall Street Journal*. He contributes weekly commentaries to *Marketplace* on public radio, appears regularly on television, and is a cofounding editor of *The American Prospect*. In 2003 Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclav Havel Foundation Prize for pioneering work in economic and social thought. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Explore: