Robert Reich

The honors on Reich's shelf are not the kind that come with a red carpet. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford. Time put him among the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the century in 2008, an assessment that measured results rather than rhetoric. The Wall Street Journal ranked him sixth among the most influential business thinkers, placing a labor-friendly economist in a lineup usually dominated by management gurus. And Inequality for All walked out of Sundance in 2013 with a special jury award for achievement in filmmaking, proof that his arguments translated to a medium beyond the page and the lecture hall.