Robert Reich Quotes

One logical consequence of this New Economy composed of big brands and entrepreneurial groups is that the unit of production is no longer a particular, identical product. The unit of production is the creative individual.

The managers of the big brands have a very clear responsibility. It's attracting and keeping talented people in order to sustain and build the trustworthiness of that brand. There is no clearer objective in the economy. Your economic success depends on expanding and building your economies of trustworthiness.

We reform the system. We save capitalism from its own excesses.

When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company.

I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.

What we really need to understand here is that it`s all about power. This is where the surge is coming from for Bernie Sanders. In some ways, it`s a very different - it`s a different surge, but it`s coming out of the same sort of sense of fundamental powerlessness and anger and frustration for Donald Trump.

The path to success used to be up and through an organization. Now the path to success is increasingly through self-promotion.

To be a skilled politician, you have to be genuine. To really make it work, you have to love people. You have to love the contact, you have to love the energy, you've gotta love inspiring people and getting their adulation in return. You can't separate what's genuine from what is necessary.

The core corporation is ... increasingly a façade, behind which teems an array of decentralized groups and subgroups continuously contracting with similarly diffuse working units all over the world.

The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.

Corporations are not people, despite what the Supreme Court says, and they don't need or deserve handouts.

The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.

Here's why I think the public service jobs are almost unavoidable: When we have downturns in the economy - and we will, for we haven't repealed the business cycle - unemployment will build, yet we no longer have any safety net. What are we going to do? Unless we decide to pull out all the stops and lower interest rates immediately and risk turning a recession into wild inflation, we're going to have to figure out some way of providing some more, not job security, but employment security.

You ask, "Could we have an honest discussion about earnings insurance?" I think we could, if people understood that the alternative was to build up a backlash against global capital, against free trade, against technological change.

Cynicism is the last refuge of those who don't want to do the work of creating a better society.

Well-trained and dedicated employees are the only sustainable source of competitive strength.

It is impossible to fight bullies merely by saying they're going too far.

There is a deep desire to change the power structure.

I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.

What characteristics are most important in creative workers? One quality you need is inventiveness. You need to be able to take whatever product or service you are providing and figure out ways of making it better, faster, cheaper. The other quality is empathy and insight into what people might want, even though they don't even know their wants, probably because there's no product or service to test their wants.

I, from the luxury of my laptop computer, can summon extraordinary bargains on everything I want, and I can also move my savings anywhere. This ability to choose more broadly and to switch more easily is the central fact of modern economic life.

The rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy then they're doing now with a large share of an economy that is barely growing at all.

We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.

The only sure way to stop excessive risk taking on Wall Street so you don't risk losing your job, or your savings or your home, is to put an end to the excessive economic and political power of Wall Street by busting up the big banks.

No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.

In the '90s it was irrational exuberance. Now it may be irrational doom and gloom.

If you give up on democracy, you might as well give up on everything.

The fastest growing occupation in the private sector is security guards. The fastest growing occupation in the public sector is prison guards. (1992)

In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.

I have found over the years that the most important way of getting people to relax is self-deprecating humor.

Look, any cut in greenhouse gases is going to be expensive for American consumers, who are in no mood to bear additional costs.

The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.

I grew up poor. My mother raised a family of four on between $9,000 and $15,000 a year.

I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America. Regardless of your friends, regardless of how good your marriage is, regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions.

One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.

If leadership is about anything, it's about leading. Not leading people back to where they already are, because they don't need that. They're already there.

We're now moving toward a radically different economy. You absolutely can't have a distribution oligopoly. The new oligopolies - and I think there will be new oligopolies - will be oligopolies of trustworthiness. Microsoft, Amazon, Schwab, and other brands will dominate psychic space, not shelf space.

More and more, leadership, whether it's profit or nonprofit, is about recruiting and keeping talented people. That's the biggest challenge. Yes, you've got to create systems that will enable people easily to innovate continuously; you've got to be a system-builder. But finding and keeping geeks and shrinks is the biggest challenge. That means leaders have got to be salespeople, they've got to be recruiters, and they've got to be actively able to understand and keep the talent they have. Leadership is courtship. That's what it's becoming.

If you want to be a change agent, you have to ready to fail.

Given that ever-broadening array of options and alternatives, as consumers and investors, we are often bewildered. We need guidance. That's where today's brands come in. They are not so much signals about a particular product, they are signals about good judgment, trustworthiness. A big brand, whether it's Schwab or Disney, is becoming analogous to a portal that sells us advice about where we can find great deals.

We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

You`ve got to just follow the money [in Washington]. You see it. There`s no countervailing power.

Every organization, no matter who it is, just follow the money.

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.