Our economy is going great (or at least was until the recent housing unpleasantness), but we are often uncomfortable with the social/environmental cost of our economic success. Robert Reich, former labor secretary under Clinton, explains how we have moved from the democratic capitalism of the fifties and sixties to the supercapitalism of today and how that has worked to our benefits as consumers and investors (lower prices, higher stock market values) but to our detriment as citizens (lower wages, worse working conditions, off-shoring of jobs, destruction of communities). He explains why business requires government to intervene to guarantee our interests as citizens, points out how our attention is diverted from appropriate government regulation, and makes arguments for changing how we treat corporations to redress the imbalance between our goals as people and our goals as financial entities. An interesting analysis - a bit slow going the first 50 or so pages, but picks up later. A nice companion to Paul Krugman’s book Conscience of a Liberal.Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Robert B. Reich
2007
Available from Amazon
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