''Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations,
which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in the Clinton
administration. It was a good book for its time—but time has moved on.
And the gap between that relatively sunny take and Reich’s latest, Saving Capitalism, is itself an indicator of the unpleasant ways America has changed.
The Work of Nations
was in some ways a groundbreaking work, because it focused squarely on
the issue of rising inequality—an issue some economists, myself
included, were already taking seriously, but that was not yet central to
political discourse. Reich’s book saw inequality largely as a technical
problem, with a technocratic, win-win solution. That was then. These
days, Reich offers a much darker vision, and what is in effect a call
for class war—or if you like, for an uprising of workers against the
quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades..''
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