Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future [review]

Commentator and former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich has been a lightning rod for conservatives over the years with his unflinching appraisals of American capitalism and the gulf between rich and poor. A Council on Foreign Relations fellow once accused Reich of being an advocate of redistribution of wealth — a misleading charge that doesn’t really sum up his views, unusual as they are contradictory for a person of his social position.

In Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future (Knopf, 2010), former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich takes on the current international economic malaise as it impacts the United States, its root causes and ways to get out of the war-spending hangover capitalism has created.

It should be noted from the outset that, as others have said of Reich’s previous books Reason and Supercapitalism, Reich is truly a talented writer. He is able to present complex economics and history in small, chewable forms that tantalize and make you want to read more. At 161 pages, Aftershock traverses the origins of the economic crisis over the last three decades, as well as forecasts future growth. Here, Reich builds on a belief that he often expresses in media commentary: that America is hobbled not by its economic and class order, but by the way it gives greater opportunities to middle classes and below to work, to ascend and to spend.

Pay as commensurate to production, Reich offers, is a bargain that broke long ago. As a result, Americans no longer have the purchasing power that the U.S. economy is capable of producing. Wage stagnation; a sense related to consumption that sociologists refer to as relative deprivation, or the comparison of one’s lot in life with peers; lobby-political collusion; and shameful excesses that drive up debt add to this problem. The result has been a spiral that in truth started years before.

In case it is not abundantly clear by his history, no, Reich is not a socialist. Far from it. You should expect Reich from the start to give an erudite though unsatisfying review at various points because his perspectives, from the lens of the global South, are neoliberal in nature. The focus on almost all the ideas in Aftershock is squarely on how the United States can advantage a situation and, then, how finances can be adjusted to stimulate the economy. Reich expends more ink on the evolution of the Chinese middle class as a buying block, for example, than the impact globalization has had on China’s poor.

Reich’s prose, entrancing though missing critical class understanding, presents a picture in which political convulsions — more in line what the United States is seeing in the creep of fascism under the guise of conservative populism than revolution — are certain unless course is changed. One can’t help but wonder if Aftershock is a bit later on such assertions.

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