INTOTHEBEST's Blog

On September 7th, Tim Van Hooser met with Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, at the Princeton Club.

Dr. Reich is an entertaining speaker and one of my favorite economists. I read his book The Work of Nations as a sophomore in college. It gave me a better understanding of macroecnomics and helped my grade in macroeconomics improve from a C to an A.

During his first week at college, Dr. Reich auditioned for a play and met a beautiful girl named Clare. Neither of them got roles and he was very sad that he would never see her again. Then, he had one of the most brilliant ideas of his career. He would direct his own play. He made posters and put them all over campus inviting people to audition for his play. The first day of auditions, 40 people auditioned, but Clare did not show up. Then he became nervous, since now he had to have the play, he had never produced a play before, and Clare wouldn’t be in it. Fortunately, the next day, Clare auditioned. He asked her to read a passage and then, playing it cool, said “Just in case we need to call you, can you write your name, phone number, and address on this 3x5 card?” He cast her as the lead in the play and she is still the lead in his life as they have been married over 20 years.

Dr. Reich also cautioned about believing ecnomists when they use statistics, as the average of his height and Shaquille O’Neal is 6′ 2″ and Robert Reich is only 5′ 2″. So if you only looked at the average, you would expect Dr. Reich to be taller. Similarly, when economists say that the average wage increased, that can be deceptive if the wages of the high-income earners increased drastically, but the low-income workers did not see their incomes increase, the overall average can go up even if some of the people did not see their incomes rise or actually saw their incomes decrease.

Dr. Reich also said he knows he can make an audience’s eyes glaze over if he starts talking about “earned income tax credit.”

When asked if he understood Republican’s economics, he said “I will try to be bi-partisan here, I don’t understand what they are doing.”

When I asked Dr. Reich about why the U.S. spends $187 Billion per year to pay farmers not to farm and why we don’t use that money to pay for everyone’s college expenses in the whole country, he said he didn’t know but that is a good idea. He also expressed concern over the fact that the U.S. spends $49,000 per prisoner to keep them in prison. One of his sons works with prisoners in NYC.

Dr. Reich spoke about how he met Bill Clinton on the boat over to Oxford when they were both Rhodes Scholars. Dr. Reich was sick and Bill Clinton stopped by to bring him chicken soup.