companies must be freed from economic calculation”. Schwab is the siren of a world where “rather than chasing short-term profits or narrow self-interest, companies could pursue the well-being of all people and the entire planet. I think that is the key point of Schwab’s great reset. I should confess I am not familiar with his first book, published in 1971, but Wikipedia (not always the best of sources) describes it as foreshadowing the now popular idea of “stakeholder capitalism”. He provided corporate CEOs and politicians with an important forum to meet at and had great success in developing a staggering network and exporting his own model. Schwab is a spectacularly capable intellectual entrepreneur, who put Davos on all the world grandees’ map. But that is not the reality we live in today. Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so. Every day, we invent new technologies that could make our lives and the planet’s health better.

It is also true that there are no easy ways out of this vicious cycle, even though the mechanisms to do so lie at our fingertips. With every passing year, these issues, as many people have experienced directly, seem to get worse, not better. Indeed, the bad news related to COVID-19 came on top of the enormous economic, environmental, social and political challenges we were already facing before the pandemic. Looking at the news headlines about layoffs, bankruptcies and the many mistakes made in the emergency response to this crisis, anyone may have been inclined to give a pessimistic answer. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that many started to wonder: Will governments, businesses, and other influential stakeholders truly change their ways for the better after this, or will we go back to business as usual? …immediate upside, perhaps, was the drop in greenhouse-gas emissions, which brought slight, temporary relief to the planet’s atmosphere. Since those early moments of the crisis, it has been hard to be optimistic about the prospect of a brighter global future. Here’s a passage that sounds exactly like Rahm Emanuel’s “we should not allow a good crisis to go waste”:

And yet a well-meaning, and good-hearted, elite sometimes may speak in ways that suggest they would love to be able to manage the global economy themselves.Ĭonsider this article by Professor Schwab for Time magazine.

Klaus schwab quotes great reset