Inequality for All is a 2013 documentary film directed by Jacob Kornbluth and narrated by American economist, author and professor Robert Reich. Based on Reich's 2010 book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, the film examines widening income inequality in the United States. Reich publicly argued about the issue for decades, and producing a film of his viewpoints was a "final frontier" for him. In addition to being a social issue documentary, Inequality for All is also partially a biopic regarding Reich's early life and his time as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton's presidency. Warren Buffett and Nick Hanauer, two entrepreneurs and investors in the top 1%, are interviewed in the film, supporting Reich's belief in an economy that benefits all citizens, including those of the middle and lower classes.
As shown via a series of suspension bridge graphs, the income gap between middle-to-low-class Americans and the top 1% in the United States was at the same extreme highs in 1928 and 2007, two years that preceded economic crashes. Reich argues that inequality in capitalism is a necessary incentive for citizens to work harder, but at a low-enough level to where democracy is protected and is in a virtuous cycle; with high-enough wages and taxes, there will be more investments in government programs, a more college-educated population, and consumer spending creating more jobs. The United States economy was in this cycle in the 1940s and 1970s, but that changed starting in the late 1970s as a result of union-busting, tax cuts, deregulation, job outsourcing, and other changes in the system meant to increase Wall Street's profits; this resulted in a decline of average worker pay and an increased amount of average income for top-earners from 1978 to 2010.
Inequality for All premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in the Documentary Competition section that had several other political films in its line-up, including another film about income inequality. It won the festival's U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking and was bought by RADiUS-TWC five days after its January 19 premiere. After months of running at several other festivals, the film was released to United States theaters by RADiUS on September 27, 2013 and grossed more than $1 million in just over a month, which was rare for an issue documentary. It received very high opinions from professional critics, who praised its easy-to-understand demonstration of a complicated topic and likeable narrator; however, it also garnered criticism for what libertarian and right-leaning sources and publications deemed to be narrow-minded, unoriginal viewpoints and lack of credible opposing arguments.
Content
Robert Reich, author, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, official in three administrations, including United States Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, narrates Inequality for All. Reich is a thinker on the topic of inequality, having spoken on the subject for nearly three decades. In a similar fashion to An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film is organized around a narrative framework of his "Wealth and Poverty" classes taught at Berkeley, with interviews of average Americans in the middle class barely getting by.
Two families are interviewed. One of them is Erika and Robert Vaclav, who raise two daughters on a single source of income of Erika working as a Costco clerk for $21.50 an hour; the couple are forced to live with other relatives after Robert was laid off as a Circuit City manager, and only have a $25 checking account. The other family interviewed is a Republican Mormon family that became pro-union after being laid off from a Calpine geothermal plant.
Inequality for All is also a biopic of Reich's life. As a child, he was made fun of for being short as a result of Fairbanks disease, and was protected by racial civil rights advocate Michael Schwerner from those who intimidated Reich. According to himself, the killing of Schwerner by the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Reich learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, inspired him to do what he could to change society for the better. Reich also discusses his time as Secretary of Labor, where he states regrets not doing enough to help fix the economic problems caused by previous administrations.
A series of suspension bridge graphs show similarities between the economies of 1928 and 2007, two years that preceded economic crashes. The economy boomed after World War II in a period of 1947 to 1977 Reich names "The Great Prosperity," when inequality was declining. Then came president Ronald Reagan's union-busting efforts and cutting of taxes on the rich in the late 1970s and 1980s; this, along with globalization, technology, job outsourcing, and Wall Street's desire to have their profits as high as possible resulted in stagnant wages, stilted college attendance rate, and the ruining of manufacturing jobs that made the middle class. In combatting this, the middle and working class took on several techniques that eventually became useless, such as working multiple jobs and longer hours, using houses as banks, and women entering the workforce. An average male worker's annual pay went from $48,302 in 1978 to $33,751 in 2010, while the average pay of someone in the top one-percent grew at a higher rate, from $393,682 to $1.1 million. As of 2013, the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150 million combined; and 42% of Americans born into poverty aren't out of it, compared to 30% of poor British citizens and 25% of the poor living in Denmark.
Although not holding liable the problem on one partisan label (Republican or Democrat), Reich's stance is left-leaning where the only right-wing arguments presented are clips of The Daily Show mocking conservative politicians and Bill O'Reilly labeling him a "communist." Reich contests the existence of a true, ruleless "free market". He challenges the ideology in which those at the top are job-creators, given that 70% of the American economy is fueled by consumer spending. The richest Americans don't use most of their money to invest in the production of goods, services, and jobs, but rather in speculation. According to Reich, the economy works best when it's in a virtuous cycle, where there is more spending, taxes, government investments, college-educated citizens, and workers as a result of higher wages; the economy is currently the opposite of that, in a vicious cycle. Venture capitalist millionaire Nick Hanauer is interviewed in the film and supports this claim: "a person like me doesn’t buy 1,000 pillows. Even the richest person sleeps with only one or two. The most pro-business thing you can do is to help middle-class people thrive." Reich also interviews Warren Buffett, where he wishes he would be taxed at a higher income tax.
While Reich argues that inequality in capitalism is necessary for incentivizing people to work, he warns that too much inequality will cause a undemocratic system; this theme is presented in a conversation with Alan Simpson, where he suggests there will be a "government on the auction block" if inequality gets worse. As Reich concludes Inequality for All under footage of Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protests, "A lot of people feel the game is stacked against them, and losers in rigged games get angry. We are losing equal opportunity in America, our moral foundation stone." The film's last lecture ends with advising his students to come up with solutions to the problem on their own before dancing off the stage to the working-class anthem "9 to 5" by Dolly Parton.
Production
Jacob Kornbluth grew up poor and lived in various suburban and urban areas around citizens of all political leanings.
Reich and Kornbluth previously worked with each other on two-minute videos before Kornbluth pitched to Reich a film based on his book Aftershock (2010). During the Great Recession, Kornbluth noticed cynicism towards the political system from his peers, feeling as if they couldn't "participate" in the economy. With his only knowledge of the American economy from conflicting mainstream media news stories, Kornbluth found himself to be the right learner of ideas from an expert in economics like Reich. For Kornbluth, the similarities between the look of the suspension bridge and the graphs of concentrated wealth in 1928 and 2007 in the beginning of Aftershock was the "ah ha" moment that made him want to learn more about the topic. Reich initially didn't see a reason for producing the film about economic inequality, but after a decades-worth amount of previous failed attempts to get the problems about severe economic inequality in the public's mind, producing a film was a "sort of the last frontier for me."
Inequality for All was first announced in a Deadline article published on January 26, 2012, its premise summarized as a "film about former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich's efforts to call national attention to the nation's gaping economic inequality"; director Kornbluth, cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko, editor Kim Roberts, producers Sebastian Dungan and Jen Chaiken, and production company 72 Productions were revealed to be working on the project. Dungan and Chaiken started producing another project, Afternoon Delight, in the middle of working on Inequality for All in order to diversify and increase their output for higher profits; this tightened work hours for both films as they planned to submit them to the same Sundance Film Festival event.
60-days-worth of original footage was shot on RED Epic, Sony F300, Canon C300 and Canon EOS 5DS cameras for Inequality for All. The amount of media compiled for the film (both original and archival) totaled 550 hours and more than ten terabytes. Although Inequality for All features several interpretations from Reich, Kornbluth developed the movie by learning about economics himself first and measuring his understandings against Reich's: "You’d see him boil it down and in a deep way thoughtfully put it together, and it raised my admiration for his argument." The most common disagreements between Kornbluth and Reich were the biographical aspects of the script; Kornbluth thought they would help the viewers emotionally connect with the material, while according to Reich they related too little to the main theme. To keep Inequality for All non-partisan, solutions to the problem were left out of the film for the viewers to go to its official website (inequalityforall.com), which featured tips on what to do.
Release and promotion
Inequality for All was one of 16 films in the Documentary Competition of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which was the most political line-up in the category's history; opponents included another film about income equality (99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film), a movie regarding Citizens United v. FECs impact on the American political system (Citizen Koch), a film about four doctors performing late pregnancy termination (After Tiller), and two productions on the war on terror (Dirty Wars and Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden). It premiered at the festival in Park City, Utah's Prospector Square Park Theatre on January 19, 2013.
Inequality for All was later screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 4, 2013, the LA Film Festival on June 23, 2013, the Traverse City Film Festival on August 2, 2013, Aspen Institute's Paepcke Auditorium on August 5, 2013, and the 2013 Deauville American Film Festival. Radius-TWC bought the distribution rights for $750,000 on January 23, 2013 with a plan for a theatrical release in summer 2013.