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![Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by [Peter S. Goodman]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41sIaU1JaBL._SY346_.jpg)
Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World Kindle Edition
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A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCustom House
- Publication dateJan. 18 2022
- File size2066 KB
Product description
Review
“A meticulously researched, clearly reported and truly infuriating history of the way the top 1% of the world has systematically arranged the way societies operate in order to become even richer, all to the detriment of the rest of us. … The book serves as a call to arms and an invitation to fight back against the continued unabashed pillaging of all economies by those who least need it.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Powerful. … Goodman’s reporting is biting and bitterly funny. … Davos Man shows us that today’s extreme wealth is inextricably linked to a great crime, perhaps the greatest one of this century: the hijacking of our democracy.” — Washington Post
“Excellent. ... An angry, powerful look at the economic inequality that's been brought into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. … A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one.” — NPR.org
"The Times’s global economics correspondent profiles five billionaires (along with workers and migrants across the world) to show how their exploitation of the pandemic has exacerbated inequality across the globe." — New York Times Book Review
“Well-written and well-reported. … A passionate denunciation of the mega-rich.” — The Economist
"A biting, uproarious yet vital and deadly serious account of the profound damage the billionaire class is inflicting on the world. Peter S. Goodman guides the reader through the hidden stories and twisted beliefs of some of the titans of finance and industry, who continually rationalize their bad behavior to themselves." — JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics
"Unflinching and authoritative, Peter Goodman’s Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning, bellowed from the blessed side of the velvet rope, about a slow-motion scandal that spans the globe. Deliciously rich with searing detail, the clarity is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe, let loose in the Alps, in search of hypocrisies and vanities." — EVAN OSNOS, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition and Wildland
“One of the great financial investigative journalists, Peter S. Goodman delivers a meticulously detailed account of how the billionaire class has hijacked the world’s economy, feasting on calamity, shirking taxes, all the while spouting bromides about compassionate capitalism. I so wish this tale of limitless greed and hypocrisy was a novel or a mini-series and not the truth about the world in which we live. Reader, prepare to be enraged.” — BARBARA DEMICK, author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha
“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’… An urgent, timely, and compelling message with nearly limitless implications.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Impressively detailed. … Very readable, extensively reported. … A well-researched and lively explanation of how the global economy works, and the turning points that have enabled profiteering by the ultra-rich while undermining societal and democratic institutions.” — Charter
“Goodman is a skilled reporter whose stories of private affluence and public squalor are filled with detail and human interest.” — Wall Street Journal
--This text refers to the paperback edition.About the Author
Peter S. Goodman is the Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times, based in London. He was previously the NYT’s national economics correspondent, based in New York, where he played a leading role in the paper’s award-winning coverage of the Great Recession, including a series that was a Pulitzer finalist. Previously, he covered the Internet bubble and bust as the Washington Post’s telecommunications reporter, and served as WashPo’s China-based Asian economics correspondent. He is the author of Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy. He graduated from Reed College and completed a master’s in Vietnamese history from the University of California, Berkeley.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.Product details
- ASIN : B092VYTQJQ
- Publisher : Custom House (Jan. 18 2022)
- Language : English
- File size : 2066 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 472 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #242 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Economic History (Kindle Store)
- #1 in Class Sociology eBooks
- #1 in Sociology of Class
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Peter S. Goodman is the global economic correspondent for The New York Times, based in New York.
Over the course of three decades in journalism, Goodman has covered some of the most momentous economic transformations and upheavals – the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession, as the Times' national economic correspondent; the emergence of China into a global superpower as the Shanghai bureau chief for The Washington Post; the advent of the Web followed by the dot-com crash as a technology reporter for the Post, based in Washington. During a five year stint in London for the Times, he wrote about Brexit, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the crises in Turkey in Argentina, the endurance of economic apartheid in South Africa, the struggles of migrant workers in the Persian Gulf, the tragic failure of land reform in the Philippines, and the catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic.
Goodman has reported from more than 40 countries, including stints in conflict zones such as Iraq, Cambodia, Sudan and East Timor.
He has been recognized with some of journalism’s top honors, including two Gerald Loeb awards, and seven prizes from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His work as part of the Times’ series on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
His new book, DAVOS MAN: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, is forthcoming in January, 2022. His critically acclaimed first book, PAST DUE: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy (Times Books, 2009), was named one of Bloomberg’s top 50 business titles.
Goodman lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the novelist Deanna Fei, and their three children.
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The first two parts of the book, while brilliantly written, may leave one with the feeling that there is no alternative to "Davos man's" exploitation of the citizenry throughout the globe. Yet, part 3 casts some rays of hope on the path ahead.


THE LIE BEHIND THE WORLD’S WIDENING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
Goodman proceeds to explain that the label as used by the political scientist “referred directly to anyone who regularly made the journey to Davos” to attend the annual World Economic Forum. But, like many others, Goodman uses it “as shorthand for those who occupy the stratosphere of the globe-trotting class, the billionaires—predominantly white and male—who wield unsurpassed influence over the political realm while promoting a notion that has captured decisive force across major economies: when the rules are organized around greater prosperity for those who already enjoy most of it, everyone’s a winner.”
FIVE MEN, AND FIVE COUNTRIES, IN THE SPOTLIGHT
To illustrate how this tiny, often anonymous group of billionaires has managed to amass such riches while impoverishing untold millions of the rest of us, Goodman develops his narrative around five individual men and explores their impact in five countries. The five men are Internet entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Benioff (Salesforce), banker Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), private equity investor Stephen Schwartzman (Blackstone), and investment manager Larry Fink (BlackRock). The five countries Goodman most closely examines are the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Sweden. As he makes clear, the overwhelming majority of people in all five countries have suffered enormously as a result of the business practices of those five men—above all, their unceasing effort to avoid paying taxes.
A THESIS MARRED BY THREE FLAWS
While I concur with almost every charge Goodman hurls at “Davos Man,” it’s hard for me to see how much of what he writes applies as broadly as he suggests. In the final analysis, Davos Man comes across as the story of a vast global conspiracy led by a few thousand billionaires to plunder the planet and consign the rest of us to penury. Some of these men are called “vulture capitalists.” Goodman seems to imply that they all merit the label. To be specific, the book strikes me as flawed in at least three significant ways.
COMPETING FACTIONS
“Davos Man” is a concept rather than a term that applies precisely to a well-defined group or class of people. Throughout the text, Goodman implies that they’re all billionaires, although he wavers on the point from time to time. Others, such as Bill Clinton and Emanuel Macron, who also frequently attend the World Economic Forum, are “Davos collaborators” who help carry out the billionaires’ agenda. But surely this oversimplifies the reality, at best.
The world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires, and the 3,000 people from nearly 110 countries who attend the Davos conference, are in no way a monolithic group. There are competing factions among them. For example, some favor resolute action to combat the climate crisis; others oppose it. Some strenuously denounce the would-be autocrats who have emerged in the West in recent years; others support them. And the attendees, even those who are billionaires, may even fund shooting wars against one another. However, it’s true enough that they seem to agree on one central theme: they all work overtime to avoid paying taxes. In that respect alone, the “Davos Man” concept holds water.
IDEOLOGY
Goodman seems to imply that the people who qualify as “Davos Men” act purely out of self-interest which translates easily into greed. But many of these folks actually believe the nonsense they espouse—the approach to economic policymaking Goodman sums up as the “Cosmic Lie.” That’s the proposition that cutting taxes on rich people and corporations will trickle down to the rest of us and be good for society in short order. Of course, four decades of experience in the United States have shown uncontrovertibly that this is ridiculous. Trickle-down economics simply doesn’t work. Despite the abundant evidence that the theory is flat-out wrong, many people believe it. Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they’re smart. Clever in most cases, yes. But not necessarily capable of parsing economic data without focusing exclusively on what’s in it for them.
STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM
The author reserves a large measure of his venom for stakeholder capitalism—an approach to corporate management that seeks to share a company’s gains among all its stakeholders. Which means that shareholders are considered merely one of several groups to benefit—contrary to the prevailing mode in business which revolves around shareholder primacy. Goodman rails against the declaration on August 19, 2019, by the Business Roundtable redefining the “purpose of a corporation.” Overturning its 22-year-old policy that held maximizing shareholder return as a company’s highest purpose, they asserted that “companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.” All five billionaires Goodman singles out signed this declaration.
As Goodman points out with undisguised animus, “you could call hotel maids ‘stakeholders’ or ‘highly valued associates’ or whatever you pleased, but when the bottom line was under attack, they became costs to be ruthlessly eliminated.” He goes on to note that “hardly any of the signatories to the Business Roundtable’s statement gained approval from their governing boards for committing to stakeholder capitalism. That fact alone laid bare that the document was really a ploy.” Without question, Goodman’s on solid ground to challenge the hypocrisy of most of the giant corporations that constitute the Global Roundtable. The signatories to the statement include such predatory employers as Amazon and Walmart. For them, a commitment to stakeholder capitalism is a species of greenwashing. But he’s dead wrong to reject stakeholder capitalism as practiced by Salesforce, whose Mark Benioff also signed the declaration—and by many thousands of other, smaller corporations.
A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
Stakeholder capitalism represents a huge step beyond the ruthless corporate practices that have driven a wedge between rich and poor in our society and made life more challenging for us all. Goodman describes those practices in gleeful detail in the pages of Davos Man. He is either unaware, or simply chooses to ignore, how companies large and small have rejected shareholder primacy. I’ve been involved in the movement for socially responsible business since 1990 and know a great deal about this subject. To learn how thousands of companies around the world—including my own firm, Mal Warwick Donordigital—are undertaking earnest efforts to implement stakeholder capitalism, check out the growing number of B Corps you can find here. And to see how the principles we’ve elaborated are now becoming embedded in corporate law, take a look at the 21st century innovation called the benefit corporation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter S. Goodman is the European economics correspondent for the New York Times. Previously, he worked for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post and served as editor of the International Business Times. He is a graduate of Reed College. Davos Man is his second book.
