Inequality for All

Robert Reich walks into a lecture and draws a graph on the board. There are two peaks on it: 1928 and 2007. Both are years when income gathered at the very top, and a collapse follows each. Reich argues that this is not coincidence. The documentary follows the case: why the buying power of the middle class fell, why wages stood still while productivity rose, and how debt filled the gap. Reich also tells his own story; he was Secretary of Labor under Clinton and was beaten at school for being short. Jacob Kornbluth directs. Robert Reich is at the centre of the documentary. It is an American production. The source is Reich's book Aftershock, published in 2010. The documentary is built like the record of a university course; the narrative runs through Reich's classes at Berkeley. Graphs and animation carry much of it; the film tries to make the economy visible. The documentary also talks to real families; how wages fail to cover things is given case by case. The narrative offers no list of solutions and that is a deliberate choice. The matter it treats is the distribution of income; the film builds it not as a moral question but as a problem in how the economy runs. Its limit is its side; the narrative turns around one person's view and gives little room to the counterarguments. Who it is for: viewers who like economic documentary and political argument. Who it is not for: it is single voiced, dense with graphs, and the ending offers no resolution.