Nov. 9--"As you can see," said Robert Reich, taking the stage with no lectern in the Thorne Auditorium at Northwestern University School of Law, "the economy has worn me down. A year and a half ago, I was 6-foot-2."

And so, with his first words, the diminutive former U.S. secretary of labor answered the question of how an economics lecture would fit within an event themed to amusement: quite nicely, thank you.

With the Chicago Humanities Festival's 2009 theme, "Laughter," projected on the back wall over his head, Reich repeatedly had the standing-room-only crowd in stitches, delivering the festival's annual Franke Lecture in Economics and leading people through a breezy but, at base, serious discussion of current fiscal problems.

"An economist," the Clinton-era Cabinet member and current professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, continued, "is somebody who did not have the personality to become an accountant. How many people did I just insult?"

He was speaking Friday, the same day, he noted, it was reported that the U.S. unemployment rate had crossed into double digits, at 10.2 percent.

Still, Reich tried repeatedly to sound an optimistic note, assuring the crowd that the national debt has been greater in the past as a percentage of the national economy, for instance. But the 63-year-old kept running up on the shoals of reality, where there's no likely U.S. manufacturing boom around the corner, the baby boom generation is beginning to hit its Social Security and Medicare years, and there is not the pent-up consumer demand that helped push the nation out of previous recessions.

He advocated for a new government jobs program, like the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s and '40s and, in the health care debate, for a single-payer system, to much applause.

Still, the health system also needs to seriously take up the idea of prevention, he said, citing his own father, who at age 80 began walking 5 miles a day.

"He'll be 96 in February," said Reich, "and we have no idea where he is."

sajohnson@tribune.com

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