Robert B. Reich

Robert Bernard Reich (born June 24, 1946 in Scranton , Pennsylvania ) is an American lawyer. He is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley . He was US Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997 .

Robert Reich

Empire (2009)

life and work

After graduating with honors from Dartmouth College in 1968, Reich received a Rhodes Scholarship , with which he studied philosophy , politics and economics at Oxford University - together with Bill Clinton . Then Reich completed the JD program at Yale University and made a career in the US Department of Justice. He taught at Harvard from 1980 to 1992 before becoming Bill Clinton's chief adviser on economic policy. After Clinton's election victory, he headed the Department of Labor from 1993. Reich campaigned for programs to fight poverty and for training initiatives. At the end of Clinton's first term, Reich resigned from the cabinet. He then became a professor at Brandeis University . Since 2005 he has been Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley . In 2014, Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In addition to his written works, Robert B. Reich also contributed to the documentation Inequality for All.

In his work Supercapitalism , Reich stated that in the prevailing economic system, individuals as consumers and investors would receive increasingly more power, but as employees and citizens less and less. A primacy of the economy over politics undermines democracy. Reich countered this with a demand for the primacy of politics .

Reich bases his view on the paradox of super capitalism. This means: The citizens in the industrialized countries and more and more people in emerging countries benefit as consumers and investors from the globalization and liberalization of the markets, but as citizens of their countries they largely reject the negative consequences. As consumers, they are looking for the best prices, but as citizens they complain about the dying out of small local shops and the poor working conditions in the supermarkets. As investors, they expect high returns, but as citizens they condemn managers who cut jobs for profit reasons. For Reich, the balance of this ambivalence is clear: investors and consumers are the winners of globalization. Your choices are constantly increasing. Citizens, on the other hand, are more and more often the losers: wages are falling, job insecurity is increasing, and so is social inequality.

The advantage of Robert Reich's supercapitalism concept is that it does not lead to an unobjective criticism of the system or capitalism, because neoliberal from this point of view are not systems, but people who act as investors and consumers. The disadvantage of the concept lies in its polarizing juxtaposition between consumers and citizens. In reality, on the other hand, global challenges such as global warming are characterized by the fact that they can only be mastered with mixed political and economic strategies: The reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, for example, requires both citizens' commitment (e.g. when voting of the legislature) as well as of the consumer (e.g. through climate-conscious consumption or voluntary compensation of emissions).

Fonts

• The Work of Nations. 1991
  • The new world economy. The end of the national economy. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-550-06824-7 ; Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-596-12833-1 .
• Locked in the Cabinet. 1997
  • Goodbye, Mr. President. From the diary of a Clinton minister. List, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-471-78563-9 ; Econ & List, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-612-26621-7 .
• The future of success. 2000
  • The future of success. How we will work tomorrow. Piper, Munich / Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-492-04359-3 ; ibid. 2004, ISBN 3-492-24019-4 .
• Supercapitalism. 2007
  • Super capitalism. How the economy undermines our democracy. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt New York 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-38567-9 .
• Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-59281-1 .
  • Aftershocks - America at the turning point Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-593-39247-9 .
• Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It . 2012. ISBN 978-0-345-80437-2 .
• Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few Vintage Books, New York 2016. ISBN 978-0-345-80622-2 .
  • Save capitalism! For everyone, not for 1%. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, ISBN 978-3-593-50608-1 .
• The System: Who rigged it, how we fix it Knopf, New York, 2020, ISBN 978-0-525-65904-4 .

Documentary film

• Jacob Kornbluth: Saving Capitalism ( Save capitalism ). 2017. With Robert Reich.

Awards

• 2008: Main Prize Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book for the book Super Capitalism - How the Economy Undermines our Democracy

Web links

• Literature by and about Robert B. Reich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Robert B. Reich at perlentaucher.de
• Robert Reich's website
• Robert Reich: "We have made a pact with the devil" , interview by Katja Gloger on stern.de , January 19, 2008
• Inequality Media , Internet project by Robert Reich and Jacob Kornbluth
• Robert B. Reich at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Robert Reich, JD Biography , ProCon, last updated on: 9/1/2010
2. ↑ Carole Cadwalladr: The movie exposing the lies at the heart of US capitalism - The Japan Times. In: japantimes.co.jp. February 8, 2013, accessed August 16, 2017 . 
3. ^ ^{A b} Daniel Buhr : For the primacy of politics over the economy . In: Vol. 57, No. 2 (2008): GWP 2-08 . (Book review on Supercapitalism ).
4. ↑ Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book Prize Winners 1993–2018 , renner-institut.at, accessed December 1, 2019