On The World in Time podcast, Lewis H. Lapham spoke with Peter S. Goodman about Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Lewis H. Lapham: Maybe you can begin with the answers to two questions raised in the title. Who is Davos Man, and how are we to understand the verb devoured?

Peter S. Goodman: Well, these are great questions. The term Davos Man was coined back in 2004 by the political scientist Samuel Huntington, and he used it to describe principally people who go to the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is this annual pilgrimage for the wealthiest people on Earth, a billionaire class along with heads of state, public intellectuals, the odd Hollywood celebrity. And they go there to schmooze and do deals and signal their virtues. They all commune under the very ironic banner committed to improving the state of the world, which is really something given that the people who go to Davos regularly are, by any reasonable standard, the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo—and the status quo doesn’t really need much improvement for them.

I used the term to refer to a kind of separate species of human: people who are so wealthy—their wealth requiring accountants and lobbyists and lawyers in multiple jurisdictions—that it really challenges their allegiance to anything other than the bottom line to institutions, to nations. And I use it specifically to refer to the billionaire class that would have us believe that they are not only not the source of our problems in the world but they are the solution to our problems.

People like Marc Benioff, who is one of the five primary characters in my book, is the CEO of a big Silicon Valley tech company called Salesforce, who literally said at Davos—this is the virtual Davos, last year, because of the pandemic—“CEOs are the real heroes of the pandemic.” He wasn’t talking about frontline medical workers. He wasn’t talking about people who were serving up our food, delivering our packages, emptying bedpans in senior citizens’ homes. No, CEOs are the heroes. And he said, “You know, we saved the world not for profit but just to save the world.”

This, I argue in the book, is not a gaffe, as some people would characterize it. It’s a worldview. It’s a worldview that assumes that if these guys are the good guys, then the more money they have, the more good they can do. This is an elaborate protection against things like progressive taxation and antitrust enforcement and regulation. They use it to essentially fend off the exercise of democracy.

Now, you asked me, “What does devour referred to in the title?” which is an excellent question. I think that if you look properly at the last half century of life—not only in the United States but also Britain and other major developed economies—what we see is this ultimate form of grift. We see a systematic bottom-up transfer of wealth from all of us to a handful of people who are capable of employing lobbyists by the dozens, who have perverted the workings of our democracies in order to concentrate more and more wealth in their hands at the expense of everyone else. They have dismantled government programs and public infrastructure. They have transferred the proceeds to themselves. And in so doing they have not only ended up with most of the wealth, they have rendered our democratic societies dysfunctional.

I think that you can draw a straight line from our extreme inequality to being in a place where we have these lifesaving Covid vaccines that many people in the United States won’t take because they’re accepting these insane conspiracy theories. The January 6 insurrection, Brexit—these are all manifestations of the same basic setup, which is that huge numbers of people have noticed that they have lost the ability to support their families in a middle-class standard. That part’s real, and it lays the ground for political opportunists who offer all sorts of cockamamy, insane, absurd explanations for what’s happened, demonizing groups like immigrants and then often advocating “solutions” that worsen inequality and that are often themselves sold by opportunistic Davos Men who use our backlash to inequality as an example to make inequality even worse.

LHL: This gets started, in your view and my own view, in 1980, with the election of Reagan, who comes in supported by the Chicago school of economic theory and Milton Friedman, and the idea that government is bad and that regulation strangles the sinews of innovation and so forth. And this is the story that is told by them, in the media, for forty years! That the people you talk about, like Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink and Stephen Schwarzman and these CEOs, are heroes—their parties, their divorces, their magnificent yachts, and so on. But they were not the hero of the story for forty years without the telling of what you call a cosmic lie. Develop the thought of the cosmic lie and point out that these people are billionaires who have had the full-throated support of most of the media.

PSG: The cosmic lie indeed does go back to Reagan. It’s not just Reagan; it’s Thatcher in the UK. It’s a whole school of Milton Friedman acolytes around the world who subscribe to this idea—and not by accident. I point out in the book that because of the assiduous lobbying of corporate interests and the careful cultivating of access journalists and compliant think tanks, there pervades this idea that, as Reagan famously put it, government is not the solution to our problems. Government is, in fact, the problem, and you can draw a straight line—it’s a long way, there’s a lot of ground to cover—but you can draw a straight line from that idea taking root to Marc Benioff in Davos last year saying, “CEOs are the heroes of the pandemic. The government did not save you. Nongovernmental organizations did not save you. We saved you—and not for profit but to save the world.”

There has been this downgrading of government services. The typical playbook is some corporate interest financed by a Davos Man pursuing their own interest: eliminate support for some government programs, some form of welfare, some health care programs, transportation, subsidized child care. And then, lo and behold, the services diminish and think tanks come along and say, “Oh, well, this isn’t working anymore. This doesn’t work. We should just eliminate it altogether.” This is the mechanism by which Davos Man dismantles public infrastructure and transfers the proceeds to themselves while telling us what I refer to as the cosmic lie in the book, which is this idea that when we organize our economies around sending more wealth to the people who already have most of it, the benefits will just magically trickle down throughout our economies—something that we’ve tried many times, and it’s worked out zero times. One part of it always does work out, and that’s the part where the wealthy people end up with most of the money. And that’s why we keep living through it.

LHL: What we’ve developed as a result is the party of the rich and the party of the poor. Mainly it’s plutocracy, which we’ve been living under for forty years. It’s not just the extraordinarily rich individuals, but it’s their whole supporting cast. It’s members of Congress. It’s, as you say, think tanks and media and so on.

PSG: Well, I think it’s us. I think that where Davos Man has been most successful is in insinuating his thoughts and his worldview into our everyday political discourse, even when we don’t think we’re thinking that way. Most of us can see through the titillation of the absurd spectacle of Davos itself: The gathering of the World Economic Forum, where I’ve gone and watched billionaires indulge in the Syrian refugee experience simulation, where they submit to being blindfolded and led around in the dark while someone’s screaming at them, demanding papers in a language they don’t understand, and then they all congratulate each other for their empathy. And they go off to a banquet hosted by some global bank where they have caviar and truffles and champagne. We can all see that as the kind of billionaire-porn absurdity that we can watch on a show like Succession or Billions. But what I think we have to identify—and this was part of my mission in writing this book—is that even ordinary people will say, “Well, we can’t possibly afford national health care,” which is something that they seem to manage to afford in every other developed democracy, because taxes would have to go so high. Listen, American tax rates have been downgraded over decades to the point where billionaires like Stephen Schwarzman, another primary character in my book, is worth about 35 billion dollars. He’s paying less of a share of his wealth in income to the federal government than the people scrubbing his toilets in his multiple residences that he owns the way most of us own socks. That’s a problem.

And if you start with the assumption that that’s just somehow how everything’s got to be or we’ll monkey wrench prosperity, then we can’t afford anything. We can’t afford to help people get to universities. We can’t afford infrastructure, we can’t afford health care, we can’t afford to help people who have lost jobs. But the trouble is that we’ve been sold this false binary that needs to be revealed, this idea that we either have the world as far as we know it now with its inequality, along with its miraculous Covid vaccines and central air-conditioning, or we screw around with that formula. And then we might as well be Venezuela. We’re all diving into dumpsters for our dinner. Of course the reality is that we can have growth and innovation and prosperity. We can even have rich people. I’m not demonizing rich people in my book: thanks, Jeff Bezos, for e-commerce! Can’t imagine how we would have gotten through the pandemic without it. But we could still ask Jeff Bezos to pay his taxes and make sure that the people who are working in his warehouses in the middle of a pandemic have adequate protection and paid sick leave, something that Amazon has been lobbying against aggressively for four decades. We have a say over how we distribute the gains of our highly successful form of capitalism, and yet we’ve been sold this idea that we shouldn’t have a say—that the government should get out of the way, that we should just outsource the solution to our problems to the billionaire class. And we’ve been running an open-air trial, and that doesn’t go well.

LHL: You refer to the current crowd of Davos Men. Compare them to the robber barons of the late nineteenth century. The second Gilded Age is the rage; that kind of begins with Reagan. Draw some of the comparisons between the first Gilded Age and our current Gilded Age.

PSG: By and large robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller were content to end up with all the money as the end in itself. They like to put their names on buildings and build university campuses and tell us that that was recompense for brutalizing labor if there was an uprising. But they were content to wall themselves off from the rest of society, enjoy their exclusive parties. And that was as far as it went. Davos Man operates on a whole different level. Davos Man would have us believe that all of our interests are collective and that he has our best interests at heart, and that government needs to simply get out of the way. Labor unions are an impediment to his visions; the more power and control he’s got, the better everything will be for everyone. And despite the voluminous evidence to the contrary, Davos Man will then use a lot of the benefits of modern society, like social media, and will weaponize them to defend the realization of the reality that we’re living through.

Take Amazon, for example. The power that Bezos has enjoyed to influence our thinking goes vastly beyond the robber barons, even though many controlled giant newspaper franchises back in the day. In the middle of the pandemic—or, I should say, the first wave of the pandemic—we know that there’s this labor uprising at this giant warehouse in Staten Island, where workers don’t have any protection. They’re getting sick. Amazon is not being transparent about how many are sick. The managers are somehow missing , and they fire the head of this labor uprising. This guy, Christian Smalls, whose story I lay out in the book, they accuse him of violating quarantine, which is incredibly ironic given that he wants everyone to effectively be quarantined with paid sick leave.

This story becomes a full-blown public relations catastrophe for Amazon. Amazon actually hires a bunch of TV consultants to produce local television segments around the country: interviews with happy Amazon warehouse workers, all the protective gear they’ve now distributed, all the measures they’re taking to keep people safe. And they distribute these to local television franchises, scores of which then air these spots as regular news stories. The power that these guys have to influence our debate—we watched Stephen Schwarzman and Blackstone, a giant private-equity company that invested aggressively in health care in the run-up to the pandemic, was at the center of this so-called surprise billing scandal, where people show up in emergency rooms thinking that they’re inside their insurer network. Only they’re not really in a position to question the particularities of their insurance policies while they’re rolled in on gurneys. They sign whatever they need to sign to go see the people in the white coats. And what they’ve signed are documents saying that they can be treated by someone out of network and get these incredible bills. They’re hassled by collection agents. This is a major reason why Americans end up in personal bankruptcy, because of unaffordable health care bills and Schwarzman and Blackstone and his whole industry. They just go on the attack. They release all these television spots, blaming this problem on the insurance lobby, blaming the solution, which is the government getting involved to regulate to prevent these sorts of practices. As you know, this is just a freebie for the insurance industry. These guys are incredibly sophisticated in demonizing the people who are actually in a position to help while again and again presenting themselves as the solution to our problems.

LHL: The health care industry is set up to prioritize profit, not the actual care. Talk about the RVU, the relative value unit. They reduce everything to money.

PSG: I didn’t think I could be shocked by the reporting that I did for this book. But health care was an area that I hadn’t dug much into in my career, and the degree to which the profit motive has insinuated itself into American health care, I just simply found it astonishing. I think you’re right. It’s all about money. And so very well-intentioned health care professionals, people who have trained to help us, are essentially put in positions where they are serving the interests of profit-making investors like Stephen Schwarzman, who view hospitals no differently than Starbucks views coffee shops or American Airlines views seats on the plane. They want people in those seats on the plane, just as investors who own hospitals want those hospitals full. This is how the U.S. loses roughly a third of its hospital rooms in the several decades leading up to the pandemic. This is why the richest, most powerful country on Earth is overwhelmed by a pandemic that we had several months to prepare for. We simply didn’t have the capacity.

I tell the story of an emergency-room doctor who works for Schwarzman’s emergency-room staffing company, called Team Health. This doctor is called Ming Lin, and he had worked as an ER doctor in New York during the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. He’s out in Bellingham, Washington, and it’s March of 2020. He is following events around the world, understands that Covid is a real problem, and he’s wondering, Why are the people at the reception desk in our hospital not wearing masks? And why is it that when they bring their own masks, the hospital administrators are telling them not to? Why is there no triage setup? Why is there no social distancing? And he’s told by his employer, “Well, you know, we’re just the client. We work for the hospital, and the hospital doesn’t want to upset the patients who are coming in the door.” He says, “Why are we doing elective surgeries?” Washington by now is in a state of emergency. Covid is definitely here. “Well, elective surgery surgeries, that’s where we earn all of our revenue.” This does not surprise him, because to your point about RVUs, relative value units, he’s gotten accustomed in the time that Blackstone has owned Team Health to being assessed. He and his colleagues are all assessed on the amount of revenue they produce per patient, which gives them an incentive to move quickly through patients, to order potentially unnecessary tests, and to avoid procedures that don’t amount to much revenue even if perhaps they might be useful to the patient. There’s a clear conflict between his training and his inclinations and the profit incentives guiding the whole enterprise. Eventually he becomes so disheartened and disgusted and worried that he goes on Facebook to blow the whistle, and he’s fired. Blackstone’s company, Team Health, actually fires him.

LHL: You mentioned Stephen Schwarzman, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink. Talk about one of them. For example, I think you say that Fink’s various private-equity operations manage something like $74 billion. Is that right?

PSG: No. So Fink is the world’s largest asset manager. His company, BlackRock, manages pension funds around the world and university endowments. He’s got $10 trillion under management, which makes him the biggest on Earth by a very large measure. And I think he’s a really important character because he’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz behind the global financial system. BlackRock has something like a 5 percent stake in 95 percent of the companies that trade on the S&P 500. This is a guy who has a front-row seat on the movement of money around the globe, and this is why, during the bailouts, the great financial crisis in 2008, both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations invite him inside the tent. He’s huddling with Treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to craft the bailouts. And again, during the pandemic, Fink is brought into even closer contact with the Treasury. This is Trump’s Treasury, headed by Steve Mnuchin, who’s sort of a fellow Davos Man. This gives him incredible power to influence the course of the very events that he’s supposed to be reacting to. And we should note, by the way, that Fink is a guy who is the champion of this notion of stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is this idea that Davos Man has glommed onto that Milton Friedmanism is over. To go back to your point about Reagan, Milton Friedman, who is like the godfather of neoliberal economics, comes out of the Chicago school—he’s all about deregulation, lower taxes. And his argument is very straightforward: Companies should maximize profit. And if they do that, society will get the benefits of efficient profit-making companies.

Today’s Davos Man, led by people like Larry Fink, they say, “Oh no, that’s not true anymore. Now we’re run by stakeholder capitalism.” This idea that we’re thinking about stakeholders like labor—never labor unions; they’re very careful not to talk about labor unions because it’s very unilateral. Benioff, who’s another stakeholder-capitalism guy, at one point he goes on television and says the planet is a stakeholder, which is very reassuring to those of us who live on the planet. It’s essentially “We’ve got this.” This is the billionaire class saying, “You don’t need to regulate us, you don’t need to tax us, you don’t need to think about antitrust enforcement. Just let us do what we do, and we’ll take care of problems like climate change and racial and gender injustice,” etc.

So Fink is the leader. He writes these letters to fellow CEOs. Every year he talks about how they better get with doing right by climate change or the markets will punish them by withholding investment. But meanwhile I tell the story in the book of how, in the midst of the worst part of the pandemic for Argentina, Larry Fink personally turns the screws to the Argentine government to cough up a couple of extra cents on the dollar in a settlement on the bonds that Larry Fink’s BlackRock credulously bought, buying into the story that the former president Mauricio Macri was this transformational agent. And when Argentina defaults, that’s a real problem for Larry Fink, because unlike back in the 1980s and 1990s, when so-called emerging market debt was controlled by a bunch of big banks, and if things went badly, the bankers could get in a room and say, “Hey, we’re going to have to write some of this off. Let’s take care of this now.” Larry Fink’s going to have to go to firefighters in Omaha, public school teachers in the north of England, and say, “Sorry to tell you, I lost half your money on Argentine bonds.” And that’s not going to go over so well.

Moreover, he’s looking around the globe and understanding that multiple poor countries and developing countries are going to have a hard time paying back the money that they owe to Wall Street, to the City of London, to centers of finance in Beijing. And so he personally turns the screws as a way to essentially send the message. As I put it in the book, nobody stiffs Davos Man. And the result of this is that Argentina, in the midst of this pandemic, has to limit health care spending. Poverty is rising. There’s less help for people who are clustered at food banks so that investors and BlackRock can get paid back at the same time. Larry Fink, while he’s championing stakeholder capitalism as a solution to climate change, is raising fifteen-plus billion dollars in investment for Saudi Aramco. This is only a couple of years after the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime. This is as Saudi Aramco, one of the largest fossil-fuel companies on earth, is expanding their inroads into natural gas, and Larry Fink is a chief financier.

LHL: When you say “Davos Man,” we understand the kind of person you mean. You mentioned five individuals. Most of us would have some idea of that, but it’s more than that. It’s not only however many individuals go to the Davos meeting every year, maybe a few hundred; it’s all of their servants. It’s a few million people who make up this class.

PSG: First of all, I could have written this book with five other people or fifty other people. I picked these guys in some cases because I knew them. I spent time with them and watched them over the years. There were particular cases that I thought were interesting during the pandemic. But there’s lots of other characters who would have told essentially the same story. The real story is that these guys employ hundreds of lobbyists. Amazon alone has a hundred lobbyists in Washington. And what a coincidence: much of the federal government seems inclined to deliver policies that are favorable to people like Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I wrote this book very much to show that none of this stuff has happened by accident.

One of the things I find most distressing as somebody who has written about economics for going on thirty-plus years is this tendency among educated self-identified sophisticates to kind of throw our hands in the air about inequality. “Well, you know, you have to talk about automation and global flows of money. They’re so complex, all forms of technology, and this is just bigger than any nation can solve through government. So we might as well just give up.” And that is an idea that comes out of a whole series of smaller ideas that, yes, come out of think tanks that are often financed by Davos Man. Actually, it was kind of amusing to see that the Wall Street Journal editorial page commissioned a review from a guy who writes for the American Enterprise Institute, which is this pro–tax cut, antigovernment think tank in Washington that’s financed by right-wing Davos Men who would love to dismantle the government and give all the money to people like the Koch brothers. I was attacked for muddleheaded thinking and championing big government. So this is the playbook.

And there is also—not to leave my tribe out of it—a very large problem in media where there is effectively capture through the practice of access journalism, a sort of smaller version of the cosmic lie. The bigger version of the cosmic lie is that if we tax, if we cut taxes on Jeff Bezos and Steve Schwarzman, we all get a piece of the action—which is not happening in my tribe. There the lie is if we make sure we’re really nice to people like Jeff Bezos and Steve Schwarzman, then we’ll position ourselves for really valuable information for the reader later on, which never happens. We might position ourselves for some product announcement that would come out eventually or some misleading profile. The access scheme begets more access, and before you know it you’ve polluted your own thinking about the whole world. And so it is a real problem that we have these glossy magazines going back now decades that lionized the CEO class. Again, I’m not here to demonize the CEO class.

LHL: No, I know you’re not.

PSG: Let’s give it up to them for their innovation and for their often very useful ideas. I just don’t think we should be entrusting them with the solution to all of our problems, and we should understand that they have their own interests at heart. And that’s fine so long as we do our part and we regulate and make sure that markets don’t get dominated by monopolies who don’t want to pay any taxes.

LHL: Yes. You make this point in the last chapter of your book that economics is not a law of nature. I mean, it’s Voltaire. The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundance of the poor—the idea that we can’t do anything about it, the idea that it’s beyond our powers as human beings to interfere with the mechanics of the free market.

PSG: Right? Look, there is no free market.

LHL: No, and we have to get over that. At the end, in the last couple of chapters, you suggest ways out: basic income, federal job guarantee, and so forth. What do you think the chances are? And how do we get out of this cage?

PSG: First of all, we’ve been here before. To your point, we have robber barons. We’ve fought these battles before. The last Gilded Age was pretty sweet for the people who were benefiting, and they had pretty good control over compliant politicians. It’s about realizing that our system has been taken over by a handful of people who are monopolizing the bounty. And the things we have to do are quite simple. The execution to your question is very not simple; it’s very difficult. But what we have to do is we have got to get back to progressive taxation, because we can’t tackle any kinds of societal problems that require government unless the government is much better financed, and we can’t ask people to make sacrifices.

How do we ask a coal miner in West Virginia to give up their job so we can address climate change if they can see with their own eyes that there’s nothing for them if they give up their current livelihood? There’s no help with job training, there’s no help with housing. Nobody’s going to provide health care or education to their children. So they’re going to fight like hell to hang on to what they’ve got. And if they can see that meanwhile at Davos, everyone is talking about win-win solutions, which is a way of avoiding sacrifice—why should they sacrifice? So that’s one thing right there. We’ve got to have progressive taxation so that wealthy people are paying their fair share, so the government can do its job, so there’s a basic sense of fairness in our society. We need enforcement of antitrust so we don’t have giant monopolies like Amazon essentially dominating their spheres and actually undermining innovation and destroying the ability of small businesses, who remain the lifeblood of the American economy, to prosper. And we’ve got to have labor power. We need to have a form of collective bargaining where workers can actually mobilize to get their piece of the pie. And all of that will create a sense of legitimacy that doesn’t exist now in the system. Now how do we do that, given that Davos Man controls much of the government? Well, that is a very big problem. It’s a bigger problem the more you think about it, and it’s going to require an understanding of the situation that we’re in and a systematic removal of money from politics. It’s going to require a hell of a fight.

LHL: I couldn’t agree with you more. And that’s why I think this book is such an important book because it at least shows us what we’re up against. I read all kinds of columnists talking about democracy in crisis, but they don’t understand what’s happening. Your book makes it clear, and we can’t know where we’re going unless we know where we are.

PSG: That’s right. Very well said.

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

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