Robert Reich Biography Quotes 20 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Robert Bernard Reich was born on June 24, 1946, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a Jewish family in a region shaped by mid-century industrial America. His childhood unfolded against the long arc of postwar prosperity and the early tremors of deindustrialization - a landscape where unions, mills, and rail lines still anchored community life, even as corporate consolidation and new technologies began to thin out the old certainties. That tension between abundance and insecurity would later become a hallmark of his public argument: prosperity is real, but it is also distributed by rules that can be changed.

As a boy he lived with a congenital condition, multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, that limited his height and subjected him to pain and medical interventions. The experience sharpened an outsider's attentiveness to power, access, and the quiet ways institutions include or exclude. Reich learned early how much social life depends on arrangements other people treat as natural - and how quickly dignity can be won or withheld. That psychological apprenticeship - part resilience, part moral alertness - helped produce a thinker who treats economics not as abstraction but as a map of who gets to belong.

Education and Formative Influences

Reich studied at Dartmouth College, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and later earned a law degree from Yale. His education bridged moral philosophy, political economy, and institutional law, equipping him to argue that markets are not merely "free" or "unfree" but are built from policy choices about bargaining power, competition, and public investment. Formed during the Vietnam and Watergate era, he absorbed a generational suspicion of authority while also embracing the technocratic tools of governance, aiming to make policy legible to ordinary citizens rather than leaving it to elites.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Reich moved between academia and government with unusual fluency: he taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School and became a prominent public intellectual, while also serving in the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter before gaining national visibility as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton (1993-1997). In that role he became a leading advocate for job training, higher wages, and adjustment to technological change and trade, even as the decade's political center of gravity pushed Democrats toward deregulation and deficit reduction. His books - notably The Work of Nations (1991), which popularized the idea of "symbolic analysts", and later Supercapitalism (2007) and Saving Capitalism (2015) - marked turning points in his argument: inequality was not an accident of skill but the predictable outcome of weakened countervailing power, from unions to antitrust to campaign finance rules. As media shifted, he became a prolific communicator through essays, documentaries, and digital platforms, translating complex policy into moral narrative.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Reich's core theme is democracy under economic stress. He frames inequality as a political problem before it is a statistical one, warning that concentrated wealth tends to purchase the rules of the game: "Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy". Psychologically, the sentence reveals a mind that distrusts inevitability only in policy, not in power: if wealth concentrates, politics follows unless citizens rebuild institutions that disperse leverage. His style is prosecutorial but teacherly - he names mechanisms (monopoly, wage suppression, lobbying) and then insists the public can understand them.

He is also wary of the bland comfort of "reasonable" politics when it masks surrender to organized money. "Centrism is bogus". The line is less a partisan sneer than a diagnosis of how moderation can become an identity that avoids conflict with entrenched interests. Yet Reich is not anti-market; he repeatedly argues that markets can innovate and raise living standards while still requiring democratic boundaries. "Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods". That concession, placed beside his inequality critique, shows an inner discipline: he prefers trade-offs to slogans, and he treats policy as the art of balancing dynamism with security, growth with voice.

Legacy and Influence

Reich's enduring influence lies in making political economy personal and public again, helping set the vocabulary for 21st-century debates over inequality, antitrust, labor power, and the capture of government by money. Long after his cabinet tenure, he has remained a reference point for progressives seeking a pro-democracy economics that is neither utopian nor apologetic about markets. By insisting that capitalism is a legal and political construction - and that citizens can reconstruct it - he has shaped how a generation of voters, activists, and policy professionals interpret everything from wage stagnation to corporate consolidation, keeping the moral stakes of economic life at the center of American discourse.