Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Reich to speak at UI on Sept. 7

IOWA CITY -- If the Obama Administration wants to get the econ0my moving again, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says it needs to address the growing income disparity in the nation that has robbed middle class workers of the ability to buy what they produce.

Reich will give the University of Iowa's 2011-2012 Distinguished Lecture on "The Next Economy and America's Future" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7,  in the main lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union on campus. The lecture is presented by the UI Lecture Committee and is part of the UI Public Policy Center's Forkenbrock Series on Public Policy.

Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, argues in his new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, that President Obama's stimulus package will not spur real recovery because it fails to address 40 years of increasing income inequality. Reich maintains there are lessons to be learned in the roots of and responses to the Great Depression.

Reich, a former economic advisor to President Obama, details in his book how Keynesian forerunners like Marriner Eccles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Federal Reserve Board chairman from 1934 to 1948, diagnosed wealth disparity as the leading stress leading up to the Great Depression. He contends that Eccles, through a monetary policy that stressed loose money supply and low rates, was able to restore the financial health of Main Street businesses and create the jobs that helped middle class workers buy what they were producing in factories.

Eccles is credited by Reich with being the architect of the post World War II boom in prosperity. He argues that without a return to the "basic bargain" (that workers also are consumers), the "aftershock" of the Great Recession will  include long-term high unemployment and a political backlash.

Reich will be signing copies of his latest book  following his presentation.

Click here to hear Reich explain what he believes is wrong with the economy and what is needed to restore it.