Robert Reich Chapter Summaries

Robert Reich is a teacher of the wealth and poverty class at the U.C Berkeley. Before teaching at this university, he taught at Harvard and worked as the secretary of labor to the Carter and Clinton administration. Reich has spent much of his time devoted to studying the small details in the United State’s economy and has become worried. Reich is most concerned with the gap between the rich and the poor and how the wealthiest have grown to hold most of the money in the US economy. Robert Reich realizes through his studies that our economy has clearly changed constantly over time and often shows a common pattern. In the past, he points out that women went into paid work, men and women worked longer hours, and many people borrowed in order …show more content…
This is interesting to me because if we could be in that economy state at one point, why is it so hard now. Also, I knew the rich had a large amount of money, but I did not realize that they hold almost all of the country’s wealth and do not spend it. This evokes many different emotions because people realize that the rich could help the rest of us if they just spent their money. Additionally, the graphs that Reich used helped me to understand the number aspect of the economy. I am more of a math person, so it helped seeing this. Also, contrasting items such as the virtuous cycle and the vicious cycle showed clear differences between a well and poor economy. The very wealthy people that Reich talked to during this film made me think more about their lifestyle. They have so much money that they do not even know what to do with it so it goes away in a bank. Whereas other people in our world are struggling to even eat dinner every night. Similarly, I thought it was interesting that one of the wealthy men interviewed said he did not necessarily need all the expensive things so he stuck to food or other items that a middle class person would buy. Lastly, I think that Reich did a very well job at getting his students to relate and understand more by using examples such as the IPhone, something that mostly every student