Saving Capitalism: For The Many, Not The Few

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family? Robert Reich does – in the 1950s his father sold clothes to factory workers and the family earnt enough to live comfortably. Today, this middle class is rapidly shrinking: American income inequality and wealth disparity is the greatest it’s been in eighty years. As Reich, who served in three US administrations, shows, the threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability. With an exclusive chapter for Icon’s edition, Saving Capitalism is passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, a revelatory indictment of the economic status quo and an empowering call to action.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He has served in three national administrations and has written fourteen books, including the bestsellers Supercapitalism and Locked in the Cabinet. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. He is co-creator of the award-winning 2013 film Inequality for All.

‘A riveting guide to how our economic and political system has become so badly flawed.’
– Joseph Stiglitz

‘Reich makes a very good case that widening inequality largely reflects political decisions that could have gone in very different directions… Saving Capitalism is a very good guide to the state we’re in.’
– Paul Krugman, The New York Review of Books

‘One of Reich’s finest works, and is required reading for anyone who has hope that a capitalist system can indeed work the many, and not just the few.’
– Salon