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Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich, a co-founder of The American Prospect, is a Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His website can be found here and his blog can be found here.

Recent Articles

The Case (once again) for Universal Health Insurance

Robert ReichApr 09, 2001
F orget a tax cut, other than an immediate one-year stimulus that puts money into the hands of people earning less than $50,000 a year. Forget paying down the debt. Use the federal surplus for universal health insurance. Working families won't get much out of any tax cut, and debt elimination is foolish. But working families keenly need affordable health care, now more than ever. The dirtiest little secret about the Roaring Nineties is that average working families gained almost no income, while their health care costs soared. From 1986 through 1997 (the latest year for which detailed IRS data are available), the average income of the richest 1 percent of Americans rose 89 percent, to $517,713. During these same years, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose 1.6 percent, to $23,815. (These figures, not incidentally, are after all federal income taxes were paid.) Meanwhile, health care costs rose faster than inflation, hitting middle-income families especially...

Suite Greed

Robert ReichWinter 1992
But for the fact that Democrats are now drinking from the same campaign-finance trough as Republicans, the scandal of executive salaries would be a major issue in the 1992 campaign. The scandal has been growing for years, of course, even before the Reagan-Bush greed decade. In 1960, the chief executive of one of America's 100 largest nonfinancial corporations earned, on average, $190,000, or about forty times the wages of his (rarely hour) average factory worker. After taxes, the chief executive earned twelve times the factory worker's wages. By 1990, the chief executive earned, on average, more than $2 million, not even including stock options that hadn't yet paid out -- a sum equal to ninety-five times the wage of his average factory worker. The regressive shift in the tax burden during the Reagan-Bush years has made the disparity even more absurd. After taxes, the 1990 chief executive's compensation was seventy times that of the average factory worker. Now, after three years of bad...

The Great Bargain

Robert ReichFall 1991
The next president of the United States either will lead the world into an era of unprecedented peace and growth, in which virtually all nations are knitted together into a seamless economic web, or will watch the world fragment into three trading blocs of advanced and rapidly developing nations, and a fourth vast territory -- stretching from South America through central Africa, Eastern Europe, and central and southern Asia -- largely characterized by deepening poverty, ethnic strife, and civil chaos. The choice is not entirely up to the next president, of course, but he will be in a unique position to influence it. As the chief executive of the only remaining superpower -- the very model of democratic capitalism to which most of the rest of mankind now openly aspires -- his words and deeds will count for much. Most of the four billion people who inhabit the Southern Hemisphere, and the 400,000,000 inhabitants of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are already experiencing sharp...

Rejoinder: Who Do We Think They Are?

Robert ReichWinter 1991
Ever since I argued in the Harvard Business Review last year that we should pay less attention to corporate nationality and more attention to whether our nation's work force was gaining the skills and competences it needed to compete, I've had the curious sense of being shoved -- quite against my will -- to the conservative side of the older debate over American industrial policy My first inkling of this transmigration came when The Wall Street Journal praised me and my argument in its editorial pages. If this were not cause enough for alarm, I found myself the recipient of expressions of shock and outrage from several fellow industrial-policy travelers who accused me of abandoning the worthy cause. And now, to deepen my gloom, comes Laura Tyson. Anyone wishing to probe my detailed views on all this has only to buy my upcoming book on the subject, The Work of Nations . (Under the circumstances, the editors of this journal surely have no objection to a little blatant book promotion.)...

Blackboard Jingle

Robert ReichFall 1990
It seems as if every conference I attend on the subject of American competitiveness (and there are many -- the competitiveness industry is surely one of America's most competitive) begins or ends with a speech by a prominent chief executive of a large American corporation about business's stake in improving the quality of the American work force. The corporate public- relations staffs who write these things must compare notes, because the speeches are virtually identical: At the start, an upbeat assessment of the current state of American industry coupled with grim warnings about foreign competitors who are gaining ground. This is followed by an assertion about the importance of the American work force to American competitiveness in the future, why skilled and educated workers are crucial, why companies have more and more need for brainpower instead of brawn, and so forth. At this point the CEO offers worrisome data about trends in the American work force. I've heard them so often I'...

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