Excepts: “But one key attribute endured despite the awkward refashioning of Davos: the lofty pledges for change voiced by the people most invested in preserving the status quo” (p. 2).

“In previous centuries, countries generally looked abroad only for items that they could not produce at home. Oceans were vast and full of pirated, tempests and other terrors.
Transportation was expensive and prone to mishaps, while communication was plagued by misunderstanding. But the advent of so-called container shipping–which put finished wares inside standardized crates that were easily transferred to trucks and rail–dramatically accelerated the pace of loading and unloading. The emergence of global banking and the internet further shrank the globe” (p. 52).

“Between 1999 and 2011, the shock inflicted by Chinese imports eliminated nearly one million American manufacturing jobs, and roughly twice that number if you considered the ripple effects–the restaurants and taverns closed as factories shuttered, the truck drivers not needed, the carpenters who lost work as their neighbors lost jobs” (p. 59).

“But indicting trade and globalization for the deprivations in American factory towns was like blaming the weather for tearing the roof off your house, rather than the contractor who had built it with shoddy materials. The ultimate culpability fell on Davos Man. He had rigged the system to ensure his further enrichment, while depriving working people of a commensurate share of the gains” (p. 62).

“The real story of how Brexit came to dominate British life was similar to how Trump had ridden the anger of steelworkers into the Oval Office, putting him in position to shower billionaires with tax cuts. It was a rebellion of the dispossessed against Davos Man, whose gluttony had yielded austerity, one fomented by a subset of Davos Men who sought the freedom to resume the recklessness that had started all the trouble” (p. 117).

“The business they pursued, so-called private equity, was a sanitized term that replaced its disgraced predecessor, the leveraged buyout industry. Its corporate raiding techniques had been a hallmark of the 1980s and its poster child, Michael Milken, the financier who spent nearly two years in prison for securities fraud. The outlines of the strategy were unchanged: borrow astronomical sums of money, buy companies slash costs (often through mass firings), and extract huge dividends before flipping the assets” (p. 159).

“Here is the central problem as the world contemplates life after a public health disaster made more lethal by the predation of Davos man: how can democratic societies attack inequality when democracy itself is under the control of the people who possess most of the money?” (p. 339).

“We simply need to avoid falling for the usual deficit-spending fearmongering that comes from Davos Man collaborators like McConnell, forever ready to extend the next tax cut for billionaires while crying poverty when the subject is help for regular people” (p. 357).

“And when the resulting anger built to cataclysmic proportions, threatening the liberal democratic order and globalization–the underpinnings of their affluence–they had conjured up novel ways to pretend to make amends, to placate the aggrieved without sacrificing anything of great value. They had erected philanthropic foundations to broadcast their benevolence. They had concocted stakeholder capitalism to display their empathy. They had adopted the language of change without yielding power to labor movements, regulators, activist shareholders, or other groups that actually had a stake in what transpired” (p. 374).

“But public education, health care, and infrastructure require money. Davos Man has looted national treasuries, leaving governments in most major economies chronically underfunded. That has left them short of the resources needed to promote growth, which has enhanced the value of other strategies to win votes, such a demonizing immigrants” (p. 388).

“If globalization run by Davos Man for the betterment of Davos Man gives way to the destruction of globalization and the pursuit of tribal interests, the world will be poorer, more violent, and less able to summon the cooperation needed to solve the most complex problems, from pandemics to climate change” (p. 403).

“In truth, even as he is prone to wax poetically about the magic of free markets, Davos Man is not really interested in that concept, or any ideological position. He propagates market fundamentalism when that serves as justification for things he craves–weakened regulations, diminished taxes, and license for monopoly power. We have not had free markets. We have had markets manipulated by the most powerful interests for their profit at society’s expense. We have had welfare for billionaires and rugged individualism for everyone else” (p. 405).

Goodman, Peter S. (2022). Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.