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Davos Man

How the Billionaires Devoured the World

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year

The New York Times's Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires' systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy.

"Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning." —Evan Osnos

"Excellent. A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one." —NPR.org

The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism's triumph in the Cold War to loot the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people, and leaving them tragically unprepared for the worst pandemic in a century.

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative "Davos Men"—members of the billionaire class—chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more.

Goodman's revelatory exposé of the global billionaire class reveals their hidden impact on nearly every aspect of modern society: widening wealth inequality, the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, the shrinking opportunity to earn a livable wage, the vulnerabilities of our health-care systems, access to affordable housing, unequal taxation, and even the quality of the shirt on your back. Meticulously reported yet compulsively readable, Davos Man is an essential read for anyone concerned about economic justice, the capacity of societies to grapple with their greatest challenges, and the sanctity of representative government.

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    • Kirkus

      December 1, 2021
      The consequences of unfettered avarice. New York Times global economics correspondent Goodman mounts a scathing critique of the greed, narcissism, and hypocrisy that characterize those in "the stratosphere of the globe-trotting class," many of whom gather at the annual World Economic Forum held in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos. Davos Man--an epithet coined by political scientist Samuel Huntington--is "an unusual predator whose power comes in part from his keen ability to adopt the guise of an ally." The "relentless plunder" perpetrated by Davos Man, Goodman argues persuasively, "is the decisive force behind the rise of right-wing populist movements around the world," leading to widening economic inequality, intense public anger, and dire threats to democracy. The author closely examines five individuals: private equity magnate Stephen Schwarzman; JPMorgan Chase executive Jamie Dimon; asset manager Larry Fink; Amazon's Jeff Bezos; and Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, who promotes himself as "the most empathetic corporate chieftain." At the same time that these men broadcast their concern for social justice, they enrich themselves by manipulating economies, lobbying politicians, eviscerating regulations, weakening government oversight, and extracting huge tax benefits. Fink's professed concern for the environment, for example, is really an alarm about risk to investments: "In a world under assault by rising seas and turbulent weather, how safe was real estate, and what were the implications for mortgage-backed securities?" During the mortgage crisis, Schwarzman's company bought foreclosed properties, amassing a large inventory that it leased to desperate renters. With their yachts, multiple mansions, and private islands, they prove themselves "unmoored from the rest of human experience." Reining in Davos Man, Goodman asserts, "can happen only through the exercise of democracy--by unleashing strategies centered on boosting wages and working opportunities, by erecting new forms of social insurance, by reviving and enforcing antitrust law, by modernizing the tax code to focus on wealth." An urgent, timely, and compelling message with nearly limitless implications.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 13, 2021
      Tax dodging, chicanery, and deceit are the stock-in-trade of supposedly humanitarian plutocrats according to this sardonic denunciation. Goodman (Past Due), a New York Times reporter, takes aim at billionaires who attend World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, to fret over global crises while sidestepping their own responsibility for them. These “Davos men,” he writes, “not only prosper but profiteer off everyone else’s suffering.” He admonishes Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos for failing to give workers adequate personal protective equipment and paid sick leave, for example, and Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman for “jacking up rents in a pandemic.” But the main charges are simple greed and hypocrisy: while Davos billionaires extol philanthropy and social justice, Goodman writes, they lobby against taxes and regulations that would trim their fortunes—and thus deny governments the capacity to solve problems by redistributing wealth, improving public services, and taming capitalism’s excesses. Goodman’s reportage doesn’t skimp on irony—attendees at one Davos event virtue-signaled on refugee issues by being “led around in the dark while blindfolded as angry officials demand papers”—but his critique is overbroad and unoriginal, with billionaires being cast into the roles of all-purpose villains. It’s colorful, but the rehash of wealthy men’s perfidy falls short of a cogent or fair analysis of their influence.

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