The wealth of nations; Down with the mega-rich.

"IN JANUARY 2021 Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, a software firm, delivered his verdict on the pandemic's first year. "We have to say it," he declared to those observing the virtual proceedings of the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual gathering of the elite in Davos, Switzerland: " CEOs are definitely the heroes of 2020."

The grandest of them were certainly among its winners. In that year, as millions of people died of covid-19 and many more faced severe hardship, the collective wealth of the world's billionaires rose by $3.9trn, reports Peter Goodman, global economics correspondent for the New York Times, in his new book. The incongruity of the fortunes of the rich soaring amid mass suffering is no accident, he reckons. Despite fervent claims to the contrary by the mega-rich, Mr Goodman says, their pursuit of wealth has undermined society's capacity to deal with crises and left the world in its present troubled state.

Mr Goodman is a veteran journalist who has covered economics for several papers and from postings around the globe. "Davos Man" is well-written and well- reported, and dedicated to exposing the falsity of what he calls the "Cosmic Lie"--the notion that what helps the rich become richer benefits everyone. To discredit it, Mr Goodman juxtaposes the view from the luxury stomping grounds of the billionaire class with vignettes from working-class neighbourhoods--pairing a yacht-riding titan of fast fashion with a jobless textile worker, the spacefaring Jeff Bezos with an overworked Amazon package-picker.

He focuses on a handful of representative billionaires such as Mr Bezos and Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, a private-equity firm, towards whom the author appears to harbour a particular animus. He serves up juicy quotes capturing Mr Schwarzman's unrepentant glee at the financial opportunities created by the pandemic ("There's always a way of making money in these types of volatile situations").

The author also documents the way some private-equity firms piled into the health-care sector--and slashed hospital capacity--in the years before the advent of covid-19.

The text vibrates with anger. The sense of outrage that radiates from the page is initially off-putting, but becomes ever easier to share over the course of the book. It is stoked not only, or even primarily, by the ways the plutocrats build their fortunes. Mr Goodman's disgust is spurred more by gymnastic feats of tax avoidance, the occasionally staggering lack of empathy and self-awareness, and the towering injustice of extreme wealth alongside terrible adversity. Thus the spleen vented at the WEF, which in Mr Goodman's description functions like billionaire therapy: a place where the very rich go to reassure themselves that they are the solution to social ills rather than the problem.

But the book is not altogether persuasive. Its arguments are weakened by a determination to pin most of the world's ills on the mega-rich. Private-equity barons may be responsible for turfing longtime tenants out of properties in order to flip them and turn a profit, but not for the high cost of housing generally, which has far more to do with middle-class homeowners' success in limiting dense development. Neither is immense wealth necessarily a product of tax-dodging and rent-seeking. Mr Bezos, for example, would not be a billionaire if millions of consumers were not so keen to shop with Amazon.

Indeed, "Davos Man" itself shows that there is plenty of blame to go around. Mr Goodman documents how xenophobia and racism flourish in places left behind by economic change, and how the charges often levelled at refugees and immigrants--that they are troublesome freeloaders--are baseless. But he sees nativism as another black mark against billionaires, rather than an ethical failure by people who may have suffered, but have not lost their capacity for moral reasoning. Similarly, he quotes a cab driver from Sunderland, in northern England, who admits of Brexit: "No one here really understood [it]. We just knew that people in London had been fucking us for as long as we could remember. It was our chance to fuck them back."

The reckless use of individuals' civic rights, as much as the sins of the billionaires, has landed some countries in dire straits. Mr Goodman ends by arguing that a better world is possible through the "thoughtful use" of democracy. It is, but only if voters are more interested in taking responsibility for improving their lot than in searching for scapegoats.

Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.

By Peter Goodman." [1]

·  ·  ·  1. "The wealth of nations; Down with the mega-rich." The Economist, 29 Jan. 2022, p. 68(US).