Robert Reich

Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy

Robert B. Reich is currently Carmel P. Friesen’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He has served in three national administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eighteen books, including the best sellers The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, and The Work of Nations, which has been translated into twenty-two languages. He is co-creator of the 2017 Netflix original documentary Saving Capitalism and of the award-winning 2013 film Inequality for All. He is co-founder of Inequality Media, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and co-founding editor of The American Prospect. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. .

In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclav Havel Vision Foundation Prize, by the former Czech president, for his pioneering work in economic and social thought. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Contact and Office Hours

Office Hours

By appointment via Aarin Walker: gspp-execasst@berkeley.edu.

About

Areas of Expertise

Industrial Policy
Labor and Employment
Leadership and Management
Politics
Poverty & Inequality
Leadership and Social Change
Macroeconomic Policy
Social and Economic Policy

Curriculum Vitae

Download a PDF (175KB, updated 09-04-2019)

Research

Working Papers

The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility

GSPP Working Paper: GSPP08-003 (August 2008)

This paper argues that the new interest in so-called "corporate social responsibility" is founded on a false notion of how much discretion a modern public corporation has to sacrifice profits for the sake of certain social goods, and that the promotion of corporate social responsibility by both the private and public sectors misleads the public into believing that more is being done by the private sector to meet certain public goals than is in fact the case.

Download a PDF (300KB)