Reading List
Robert Reich
Economist and Former Labor Secretary
Robert Reich was US Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997, and has spent the decades since arguing that inequality is a political outcome rather than a natural one, and that the rules of the market are written and can be rewritten. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Work of Nations make that case at book length.
He is Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley, has served in three national administrations, and reaches a large audience through short explanatory videos and the documentary Inequality for All. His other books include Supercapitalism, Aftershock and The System.
Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville
“For example, Tocqueville, as he wandered up and down the east coast of the United States, saw something that puzzled him a great deal at first. He saw Americans who were among the wealthiest in their communities investing in public schools and improving highways and being community leaders. He asked himself: “Why did they do this?” In Europe it was all about honour, duty and patriotism and noblesse oblige.” — Source
The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
“Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption”. Less well remembered is his phrase “conspicuous leisure”. Veblen saw the importance of social status as a motivator in capitalism. He was the first to understand that one of the reasons that people desperately wanted to become rich was not simply to consume but to consume in such a way that they established themselves as being superior to others.” — Source
The Wheels of Commerce
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volume 2
by Fernand Braudel
“Again and again, capitalism reached points where, if the state did not intervene in such ways as to induce more competitiveness, it would collapse under its own weight. In other words, what Braudel saw was this continuing evolutionary balance between the state and capitalism, in which the state needed to support capitalism but at the same time needed to guard against its excesses.” — Source
The New Industrial State
The James Madison Library in American Politics
by John Kenneth Galbraith
“If anything, Galbraith’s book was a warning about that technostructure. The United States, and by inference all nations practising democratic capitalism, had to be careful to make sure that we understood what the technostructure was doing and why it was doing it and how it was trying to influence all of us. Galbraith understood 20th century consumerism probably better than anyone.” — Source
The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
“The only way they are going to have more freedom is if government, as Croly envisioned, counterbalances the enormous power of the large corporations and Wall Street. But in order to do so, government has to be more responsive to average people. This, of course, gets us back to the points I was making a moment ago. We have got to have a democracy that is not corrupted by great wealth and power.” — Source