How former Labor Secretary Robert Reich packages his anti-inequality message for Gen Z

Robert Reich has been warning people about the dangers of inequality for decades, in all sorts of different ways. He’s interacted directly with politicians as a member of three different presidential administrations, most notably as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary. He’s taught thousands of college students at Harvard, Brandeis, and UC Berkeley. He’s written 18 books. And for 11 years, he has run Inequality Media, a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about income and wealth disparity, among other imbalances of power in our society. 

Inequality Media now has 15 million followers across all its social media channels. At a time when Americans are increasingly paying attention to issues of affordability and rising extreme wealth—even outright blaming billionaires for making society less fair—Reich’s content is striking a chord. 

Reich and Inequality Media executive director Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about how they reach such a wide audience, the importance of experimentation, and the power of educating people about these issues.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was the original spark for Inequality Media, and why were short-form videos the right fit for that kind of work?

Robert Reich: Well, sometime around 2013 or ’14, my son, Sam Reich, said, “Dad, I think you have written a lot of very good books and people like your books, but if you want to reach my generation, it’s not through books. It’s through social media.” And I didn’t fully understand even the meaning of the word social media, but he was very kind and he explained a lot to me. And it seemed like we needed to have some sort of social media company to produce videos.

His point—and I think he’s absolutely right—is that videos do something that the written word doesn’t do. And this is particularly true of young people who are very acutely aware of what happens visually. They pick up very, very subtle details in terms of visual media, but they are not, as my generation was, readers.

And Heather, how did you get involved?

Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse: I got involved because Bob, as I call him, Professor Reich, emailed me and said, “Hey, I’m doing a new thing. Do you want to talk about it?” He and a fellow named Jake Kornbluth had gotten together and made a feature-length documentary, and they said, “Okay, let’s make videos. We’ve done it long-form. We can do it short-form.” And so I came in and said, “Let’s figure out internet video, specifically social video. What are these first three seconds people care about?”

To have this organization change over 11 years, we couldn’t have predicted it. We are social video first, but we’ve expanded into podcasts, we’ve expanded into feature films, we’ve expanded into doing some radio. We’re trying to create more ripples and say the same thing in many ways. A nesting dolls approach—put it in different formats, the same messages.

You talk about all types of inequality—economic inequality, racial inequality—but democracy is really core to this message, too. Why is that an important focus of this conversation, especially from the beginning?

RR: Because one of the most really unfortunate aspects of the degree of inequality—of income and wealth inequality the United States is now suffering from—is that it has found its way into American politics through everything from campaign contributions to public relations undertaken by very wealthy people, to other ways in which really great wealth is translated into great political power.

You can’t separate wealth and power. I mean, arguably, wealth is not a zero-sum game. It is certainly possible for some people to become extraordinarily wealthy without the necessity that other people become poor or don’t have adequate resources.

But power is a zero-sum game. That is, if few people have it, that means that other people don’t. And this is really what the great jurist Louis Brandeis was getting at when he was reputed to have said in the late 1920s: America faces a choice. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few people, or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.

In your political positions, you spoke to policymakers or people with some sort of political power. And then as a professor, you spoke to students. But now you’re really speaking to the internet, to the everyday Americans. Why is it worth talking to these people about these issues, especially when some people can feel that they’re a little bit powerless to change things?

RR: Well, they are not powerless. The point is, that is where the power is, or should be. The only way of breaking through elite domination of our politics and our economy is by empowering average people to become more politically active and to understand the relationship between politics and economics, to understand why they have a huge stake in changing the rules of the game in their own favor, in ways that enable them to have a fair shot at making it.

We are not a news organization as such, but the news constantly every day is in front of people. That’s what most people talk about. But the news that is in front of them is also symptomatic of deeper structural issues, changes in the political economy, changes in the rules of the game. Why is it, for example, that a president can essentially initiate a war on his own without Congress, without our allies, without enunciating to the American people why we are going to war, and then have such an extraordinary negative impact on oil prices, on what the cost of living is for actual people, in the span of days?

That needs to be explained to people because a lot of them are wondering about it. It’s underneath the surface of the news, but it does require some explication. And that explication gives us an opportunity to explain to people the structure of both the economy and our political system and the ways in which they are inextricably wed together.

The other point here: This is nonpartisan in the sense that we are not touting the Democrats, we are not pro-Republican, but we are pro-average working people. This is something that’s very, very important because average working people are the ones who are bearing the costs of a system that is no longer in their hands. They are bearing the costs of political decisions that are helping enrich those who are already rich and are making it harder and harder for those who are not rich to get ahead. That’s the story of America at this particular point in time. That’s the underlying anger that we are dealing with in this country.

Are there any particular tactics for reaching new audiences who may not be aware of these issues or agree with your personal politics—to still break through and educate them?

RR: It’s a combination of a variety of experiments. Empirical experimentation is really at the heart of it, because we try to be very agile. We are continuously trying new things. Success can be an enemy because success makes it harder to change. Success makes it easier for everybody inside an organization to say, “Well, we did it this way. Let’s just keep doing it this way.” So what we are blessed with is a group of people who are not bound by success, who want to continuously find ways in which social media can be used in new effective modes.

And there are a lot of people that follow us, and I don’t mean follow us in the sense of following, just tuning in. There are a lot of organizations, not-for-profits, there are a lot of social media groups that I’ve noticed use techniques that we develop because they’re so effective, and that’s great. We don’t try to stop anybody from using these techniques. In fact, quite the opposite. We develop new techniques, and we want the world to use them.

I notice you do a lot of joint posts with other accounts, other nonprofits, other similar organizations, which seems like a great way to reach new people and new audiences.

HKL: We love a collab post on Instagram, and thanks go to these companies who are making it easier for us to do that. But yeah, we work with a lot of different people. We have different experts come in. We lean on different organizations to surface data in interesting ways that we can use. But in terms of persuading people, every platform is different, right? If you have a bunch of people following you, on average, they’re probably going to skew in a certain direction because they follow you and they interpret your content in a certain way. But the good thing about the internet, and the way we can play around with digital media, is that you can test your content with people who don’t follow you, right? And you can try and get it out in new ways. And so that’s what we try to do.

We try to say, “Oh, did that message hit with, I don’t know, self-proclaimed independents?” And you can see how the content does. And then you can try and get it out beyond your specific followers. But it takes time and thought. And it’s so fun to see some of the qualitative feedback when we do tests and they don’t know who Professor Reich is. They don’t say, “Oh, he was with the Clinton administration, so therefore I have thoughts about him.” They say things like, “Wow, that presenter was really compelling.” Or, “Who’s the actor? I really heard what he said about the minimum wage.”

You’ve got to be savvy about it. You can’t just do one post and hope that a full range of America is processing it because they’re not, for a lot of reasons.

Can all of these issues of inequality be solved by messaging? Is it just a point of first making sure that people are aware and understand what’s going on?

RR: I think it is fundamentally a matter of explaining to people what they already observe and feel in terms of the political economy around themselves. People are very acutely aware, for example, of prices. They know exactly what’s happening at the gas pump. Every time they fill up their gas tanks, they see precisely what’s happening. They’re very aware of their jobs. They’re very aware of their incomes. They’re aware of the cost of childcare, the cost of eldercare. People are immersed in this world, but what they lack very often is an understanding of why.

What’s happening has to do with the institutions of our society—everything from the Federal Reserve, all the way through how state governments are operating and how income taxes versus sales taxes are working. But it goes fundamentally to questions of power. Who has the power? How do they exercise that power? How can they be made more accountable with regard to the power that they are exercising, both in the public sector and in the private sector?

HKL: Our mission is to educate and engage. So we don’t write public policy. We’re not writing the new, latest wealth tax that someone’s doing. That’s not our role. Our role—and we’ve owned it from the beginning—is educating and engaging. And then people can feel empowered to request different things of their elected officials. They can go out and sign petitions. They can run for office themselves. They can be the leaders that we need and that many of them actually want to be. So much needs to be done to solve or lessen inequality and the gaps here. And so much of it is systemic and policy-related. But I think messaging is key, and that’s our role.

In The Last Class documentary, Robert, you say a true leader helps people overcome cynicism. These issues that you’re talking about can make people a little bit cynical about the state of the world. How do you veer away from cynicism and toward hope? And do you have hope about all this?

RR: I certainly have hope, and I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if I were not hopeful. But I think there’s a difference between [cynicism and] skepticism, which is appropriate. I think people do need to be skeptical when they hear the news, when they view social media, when they’re engaged with all of the ways in which facts and news and lies travel at an accelerating speed.

I think it is very important for all of us to understand that hopelessness is a dead end. That’s the end of the road: We can’t reform our system, we can’t change our democracy, we can’t make the economy work for most of us, we can’t create a society that most of us value and most of us would like to be a member of, if we lose hope. If we become so cynical that we basically say to ourselves, “It’s not worth even trying”—that’s something that I think is in the background of what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to give people levers, ideas, to not only empower them through understanding what’s actually happening, but also to empower them through a sense of what they can do as ordinary Americans.