American political economist, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, U.S. Secretary of Labor under Clinton (1993–97), and for forty years one of the most visible American voices for the proposition that rising economic inequality is not a byproduct of economic progress but a self-reinforcing threat to democratic government. Reich is short (4'10", the result of a childhood genetic condition), disarmingly approachable, and — through books, a long-running newsletter, and an enormous social-media presence — among the few American economic commentators whose audience extends well beyond the usual political readership.
His central argument, developed across a dozen books and distilled most sharply in Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (2015) and The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (2020), is that the familiar contrast between "free markets" and "government intervention" is itself a political obfuscation: markets are always constituted by rules (property, contract, bankruptcy, intellectual property, antitrust, labor, financial regulation) and the question is never whether government will shape them but whose interests the rules will serve. Since roughly the late 1970s, Reich argues, American economic rules have been progressively rewritten to funnel income and wealth upward — and the resulting concentration of economic power has in turn rewritten political rules to protect itself. Money buys political voice, and political voice cements the arrangements by which money is acquired — a self-reinforcing loop that Reich treats as the central pathology of contemporary American democracy.
Reich's earlier books — The Work of Nations (1991), written before he joined the Clinton administration, on the bifurcation of American workers into "symbolic analysts" and everyone else; The Future of Success (2000) on the costs of winner-take-all labor markets — prefigured much of what later writers (Piketty, Hacker and Pierson, Giridharadas) formalized. His Berkeley lectures on inequality, filmed and freely available online, reach orders of magnitude more students than the classroom versions. The 2013 documentary Inequality for All distilled the core argument for general audiences.