What’s indisputably great about this new economy is that so many of us can buy into speed, comfort, opportunity and deals that we hadn’t imagined ten years ago. What’s not so great, as Robert Reich observes, is that we’re not just consumers and investors. We’re also workers-that is, producers, at tremendous risk from competition; and we’re family, friends and neighbors whose connected private time seems to have disappeared.
This is one of the dilemmas that Robert Reich lived as a husband and a parent before he quit Bill Clinton’s Cabinet. In his take on “The Future of Success,” this is the crack: to be optimistic about this hyper-productive economy is to be pessimistic about our sanity as stressed-out players in a hyper-competitive society. The downturn to worry about isn’t a recession, Reich would tell you. It’s our weakening confidence in the social value of equality, stability, loyalty. Robert Reich is this hour, on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Robert Reich, author of “The Future of Success”