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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

Coping With the Shortage of High Tech Workers

Robert ReichDec 19, 2001
Computer World The biggest threat to America's booming IT sector is a severe shortage of skilled people. Some estimates put the current shortfall at 400,000. What's to be done? In most industries facing such shortages, salary levels rise until enough people are attracted to fill the need. Supply responds to demand. But, as you'll see in Computerworld's 13th Annual Salary Survey ("Return to Sanity,"), salaries in the corporate IT sector have been rising no faster than in most other parts of the economy. There's no beating the free market: If the IT sector wants more skilled people, it is going to have to pay for them. And salaries don't even tell the whole story. IT jobs are becoming less secure. The half-life of a software engineer is coming to resemble that of a professional athlete. One recent survey shows that six years after getting their computer science degrees, 60% of graduates are...

Look Who Demands Profits Above All

Robert ReichDec 19, 2001
Los Angeles Times Despite the populist rhetoric of this campaign season, many traditional Democrats are pushing companies to generate higher returns regardless of social responsibility. These Democrats may not mean to do it, but this is the practical consequence of how they're saving for retirement. American teachers, civil servants, unionized workers, college professors and similar Democratic stalwarts are putting their savings into giant funds like TIAA-CREF, the $ 290-billion teachers' retirement system, and the $ 175-billion California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS. The teachers and others want the highest returns they can get. So the large institutional investors are demanding that companies make big profits and boost their share prices. In recent years, institutional investors have been active in ousting chief executives at IBM, AT&T, Sears, General Motors, Xerox, Coca...

Why You're Spending More Time in Airports

Robert ReichDec 19, 2001
Broadcast June 8, 2001 Have you ever got to an airport to discover your flight's been delayed an hour or two, or more? Or its been cancelled altogether? Or after your plane leaves the gate, you spend the next hour on the runway waiting for it to take off? And as a result, you miss your connecting flight, and you don t get to the wedding or a funeral or meeting you had to get to? Join the crowd. America's entire air traffic system is overwhelmed, failing to keep up with growing demand for air travel. So now the Federal Aviation Administration comes up with a new 10-year plan, featuring more runways, bigger airports, and better technology. Fine. But the FAA has been promising these things for years, and they haven't happened. Since 1978 only one major new airport in America. In the last decade only a handful of new runways. And the last time the FAA tried a major overhaul of air-traffic technology it wasted billions of dollars on a system that didn't work. The FAA's new plan doesn't...

American Optimism and Consumer Confidence

Robert ReichDec 19, 2001
Broadcast Sept 18, 2001 Ask somebody who's not from the United States to describe Americans, and almost invariably you'll get a description of someone who's outgoing and upbeat. No challenge is too great for us, no obstacle too high. In fact, to the outsider, our overwhelmingly sunny view of life sometimes seems a bit naive, our boundless enthusiasm rather childlike. American optimism carries over into our economy, which is one reason why we've always been a nation of inventors and tinkerers, of innovators and experimenters and why we're the most productive economy in the world. Optimism also explains why we save so little and spend so much. As long as such things have been measured and compared, Americans have had the lowest rate of saving and the highest rate of personal spending of any major economy, and over the last decade, we've saved less and less and spent more and more. Our willingness to go deep into debt and keep spending is intimately related to our optimism and our...

The treadmill of the new economy

Robert ReichDec 19, 2001
Interview by A J Vogl Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich looks at why so many people feel they're running just to stay in place. Robert B. Reich makes it look easy-from university to government back to university again. In 1992, he left Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to serve as secretary of labor during the first Clinton administration-the third in which Reich has served. Four years later, he resigned that position; currently, he is a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and its Heller Graduate School. But while Reich returned to academe, he didn't retire to academe. He keeps busy writing books (eight at last count), is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's "Marketplace," and is national editor of The American Prospect magazine, which he co-founded. He has also been quoted as being interested in running for governor of Massachusetts. Reich's latest book, The Future of Success (Knopf), is related to his magnum opus, 1991's The Work of...

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