IT’S Labor Day weekend, so let’s talk about labor. (Capital absorbs our attention most of the other 364 days of the year.)Around 140 million people are employed in the United States. They are engaged in work like governing, manufacturing, health care providing, retailing and researching (as well as suing).
This gigantic army of laborers, argues Robert B. Reich, has morphed into a nation of consumers and investors, rather than citizens. “Supercapitalism” (Knopf, $25), his 11th book, seeks to explain why this supercharged economic system is a civic problem, and what can be done about it.
Mr. Reich, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, does not rip into opaque hedge funds and demand their regulation. Nor does he harp on lax government regulation of credit and mortgage practices. On the contrary, he criticizes many of the usual liberal fixes directed at the “excesses of the market.” His book is smart and compelling, if ultimately toothless.
Born in 1946, Mr. Reich served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, the avatar of the have-it-all baby boom generation. Equally significant, though, is that Mr. Reich’s government service dates back to the administrations of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter — that is, to the 1970s, the decade when America’s immediate postwar economy, a middle-class bonanza like no other, began to give way to today’s upper-class bacchanalia.
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