Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Robert B. Reich (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 21, 2010

A brilliant new reading of the economic crisis—and a plan for dealing with the challenge of its aftermath—by one of our most trenchant and informed experts.

When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living.

Persuasively and straightforwardly, Reich reveals how precarious our situation still is. The last time in American history when wealth was so highly concentrated at the top—indeed, when the top 1 percent of the population was paid 23 percent of the nation’s income—was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Such a disparity leads to ever greater booms followed by ever deeper busts.

Reich’s thoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over the next decades reveals the essential truth about our economy that is driving our politics and shaping our future. With keen insight, he shows us how the middle class lacks enough purchasing power to buy what the economy can produce and has adopted coping mechanisms that have a negative impact on their quality of life; how the rich use their increasing wealth to speculate; and how an angrier politics emerges as more Americans conclude that the game is rigged for the benefit of a few. Unless this trend is reversed, the Great Recession will only be repeated.

Reich’s assessment of what must be done to reverse course and ensure that prosperity is widely shared represents the path to a necessary and long-overdue transformation. Aftershock is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for both restoring America’s economy and rebuilding our society.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reich (Supercapitalism), secretary of labor under Bill Clinton and former economic adviser to President Obama, argues that Obama's stimulus package will not catalyze real recovery because it fails to address 40 years of increasing income inequality. The lessons are in the roots of and responses to the Great Depression, according to Reich, who compares the speculation frenzies of the 1920s–1930s with present-day ones, while showing how Keynesian forerunners like FDR's Federal Reserve Board chair, Marriner Eccles, diagnosed wealth disparity as the leading stress leading up to the Depression. By contrast, sharing the gains of an expanding economy with the middle class brought unprecedented prosperity in the postwar decades, as the majority of workers earned enough to buy what they produced. Despite occasional muddled analyses (of the offshoring of industrial production in the 1990s, for example), Reich's thesis is well argued and frighteningly plausible: without a return to the "basic bargain" (that workers are also consumers), the "aftershock" of the Great Recession includes long-term high unemployment and a political backlash--a crisis, he notes with a sort of grim optimism, that just might be painful enough to encourage necessary structural reforms.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Since his tenure as secretary of labor in the 1990s, Reich has expounded his economic and political opinions in books, and here he reviews the recent recession. His retrospective diagnosis for the recession’s cause is simple: too much national income went to the rich, which induced the federal government and the middle class to subsist on credit, creating a bubble that inevitably burst. From his identification of stagnant consumer purchasing power as the problem, Reich’s solution unfolds with ineluctable Keynesian predictability: raise income, inheritance, and capital-gains taxes on the rich, and move the revenue down the income scale in the form of expanding programs such as Medicare and Medicaid or tax breaks such as the earned income tax credit. Reich also wants a “wage insurance” program and a carbon tax: blissfully, the federal government’s debt would not increase under such a restoration of the “bargain” between rich and nonrich, according to Reich. Ensured a current-events hearing by his public prominence, Reich may find his readership defined by those in tune with his short tract’s expansionist view of government. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 21, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307592812
• ISBN-13: 978-0307592811
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.8 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (192 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > Banks & Banking
  • #88 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Political Economy

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

512 of 537 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An important book offering critical insight into the true cause of the economic crisis September 21, 2010

By Robert Stryzinski

Format:Hardcover

AFTERSHOCK may well be the most important book written on the current economic crisis. I say this because it offers a critical insight that I have seen in very few other places: The fundamental cause of our problems is the relentless drive toward income concentration. The problem with concentrating income into the hands of a few people is that you take money from millions of people who would spend nearly all of it, and give it to a tiny number of people who can't and won't spend it -- but will instead save it, gamble with it, or invest it offshore. The end result is simply too few viable consumers to drive the economy.

Reich points out that income for American middle class families has been essentially stagnant or declining for over three decades. The middle class has coped with this in three basic ways: (1) Women have entered the workforce, (2) People worked longer hours, and, of course, (3) We all relied on debt (credit cards and home equity loans) rather than income to support our consumption. Those coping methods are now exhausted, and we are left in a position where average Americans simply do not have sufficient discretionary income to support a sustainable recovery. The great American consumer class -- which was the driving force behind our prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s -- has been largely decimated.

To his credit, Reich correctly identifies globalization and, especially, automation technology as primary forces behind declining middle class wages. At the same time, rather than enacting countervailing policies, the United States (beginning with Reagan) has gone in the exact opposite direction and adopted a conservative agenda that has actually accelerated the trend toward income concentration.

The one shortcoming of the book is that Reich -- not being a technologist -- fails to anticipate how advancing technology is likely to dramatically worsen the situation in the relatively near future. As someone who works in this area, I can tell you that the degree of progress we are soon likely to see in automation technologies is historically unprecedented.

To get a sense of what we may face in the future, I would strongly recommend that this book be read in conjunction with Aftershock: The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. Both books offer an eerily similar analysis of the crisis -- both concluding that the problem is a dearth of viable consumers. Both books also propose very similar solutions: direct income supplementation. Reich proposes a negative income tax (which was supported by free-market icon Milton Friedman).

Anyone who wants to understand the current crisis and the danger we face in the future should read both "Aftershock" (for its emphasis on political and social implications) and "The Lights in the Tunnel" (for insight into how technology and globalization will continue to transform the economy -- and lead to an even more severe crisis, if we do not act ).

193 of 208 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes" Mark Twain September 23, 2010

By Johnny Na

Format:Hardcover

Every middle class American should read this book. Many observations about income disparities have been written up lately but Reich pulls the important points together in a powerful and accessible way.

Reich's main thesis is that the current transition the US economy is under is misunderstood. Many of the policy elite (Geithner, Volcker) have repeated the familiar claim that Americans are living beyond their means. Personally I don't discount that completely but Reich's insight goes much deeper and rings truer: "The problem was not that American spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them."

"We cannot have a sustained recovery until we address it. ... Until this transformation is made, our economy will continue to experience phantom recoveries and speculative bubbles, each more distressing than the one before."

Anyone looking at the unemployment data since WWII has to wonder why the unemployment component of the last three recessions is so prolonged. Instead of a sharp trend up, there are long slopes of delayed returns to peak employment. (Google "calculated risk blog" and look at Dec. 2010 articles.) I believe Reich has demonstrated the main culprit this. To be clear, he is not describing the detailed mechanics of what triggered the Great Recession. (Nouriel Roubini has a good book that I would recommend for more on the financial fraud, leverage and credit risks involved - Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. ) But Reich is taking a long term view and exposes a dysfunctional trait of the US economy that no one can afford to ignore. It is this weakness that will delay the current recovery and continue to create greater risks in the future.

Reich draws the parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, particularly the imbalance of wealth concentrated in fewer hands and middle class workers with less income to convert into consumer demand. One of the fascinating devices he found to do this was the writings of Marriner Eccles (Fed chair between '34 to '48):

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth - not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced - to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."

Reich also shares a couple of powerful and disturbing graphs that show how the middle class has been squeezed and also how since the late 70s, hourly wages have not only not kept up with the rise in productivity but have remained essentially flat.

Another driving theme Reich presents is the "basic bargain" and he evokes Henry Ford, the man that took mass production to new heights and paid his workers well:

"[Henry] Ford understood the basic enconomic bargain that lay at the heart of a modern, highly productive economy. Workers are also consumers. Their earnings are continuously recycled to buy the goods and services other workers produce. But if earnings are inadequate and this basic bargain is broken, an economy produces more goods and services than its people are capable of purchasing."

I was concerned early in the book that Reich would leave out some of the important complexities of the topic but he covered related finances, politics and even consumer/voter psychology in a succinct yet informative way. His summary of changes to the labor market in the last 30+ years was very good.

His ideas for correcting this were interesting if perhaps difficult to implement politically. My take away however was that this is a strong indicator of how bad he thinks the situation really is. Many Americans may be yearning to return to "normal". Reich is the first to thoroughly convince me that it is not going to happen.

This is a very quick read of 144 pages and is well worth the time.

116 of 130 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Redistributing the Wealth September 23, 2010

By Victor A. Gallis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In this concise and well reasoned book, Robert Reich shows that the origin of the "Great Recession" lay in the widening gap between the very rich and the middle class. In brief, middle class incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated or even declined, while the very rich have accumulated a larger and larger share of the nation's wealth. The nation's wealth has indeed been redistributed: upward.

This created a structural problem in the economy, since middle class workers no longer can afford to buy the products and services they produce, and the very rich cannot possibly spend the vast amounts of money they accumulate. Businesses remain "profitable" by outsourcing jobs or replacing workers with technology; this compounds the middle class dilemma because many of the jobs they did are gone forever.

With a shrinking consumer base for the products they offer, businesses cannot justify expansion, and do not create jobs. The rich, looking for places to put the huge amounts of money they control, are attracted to speculation; new bubbles are inevitable. At the same time, great wealth translates into political power, making any useful change extremely difficult.

Since the problems are structural, they must be solved with structural changes, and Reich ends with a list of suggestions for the kinds of changes that could help direct more money and success to middle class Americans. Many readers will think his suggestions are politically unfeasible, and while he makes a valiant stab at optimism, it is clear that Reich is very much aware of the obstacles in the way.

Before things get better, it seems, they will have to get worse. Much worse.