Davos Man

by Peter S. Goodman

If you looked past the places where lots of people had died, not that many people had died.

Davos Men like Benioff increasingly favored the idea, positing basic income as a form of compensation for how their lucrative technological innovations tended to destroy jobs. If the billionaires liked the idea, that raised the prospect that it was, like stakeholder capitalism, a calculated means to stave off a more meaningful transfer of wealth. But it also meant that basic income had greater potential to gain political support.

Bill Clinton, raised in Walmart’s home state of Arkansas and educated at Yale Law School, where he studied with Bork, presided over an unrestrained wave of corporate mergers. He lifted strictures on banking, setting the stage for the financial crisis of 2008. He deregulated telecommunications, allowing cable and telephone companies to fashion dominant conglomerates, and preparing the path for Google, Facebook, and the other modern-day monopolists.