Davos Man Quotes

“I don’t think it would help the growth of the U.S. economy,” Dell said. “Name a country where that’s worked. Ever.” This was clearly intended as a rhetorical question, but the panelist seated to his left, the economist Erik Brynjolffson, immediately blurted out an answer. “The United States,” he said. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s,”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“his hired guns—lobbyists, think tanks, battalions of public relations people, and obsequious journalists”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Widening economic inequality, intensifying public anger, and threats to democratic governance have all resulted from the depredation of Davos Man—an unusual predator whose power comes in part from his keen ability to adopt the guise of an ally.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Davos Man championed stakeholder capitalism as a means of preempting government regulation; as a substitute for the public making use of democracy to fairly distribute the gains of capitalism.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“They feasted on calamity,”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Across Europe, part of the explanation for the lethality of COVID-19 was indeed that health care services had been diminished to finance tax benefits for Davos Man.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Limiting expenses and rewarding shareholders had taken precedence over social welfare.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Privatization was sold as the means of injecting greater efficiency into the health care system as it contended with declining levels of financial support.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Before 2020 ended Bezos came to personify the rapacious opportunism of the billionaire class who were extracting wealth from a public health emergency, at the expense of employees laboring in proximity to the virus.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Tax policies written by Davos Man for his own benefit had enhanced the divide. A pair of University of California at Berkeley economists2, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, tallied up all the taxes that Americans paid, from federal, state, and local income taxes to sales taxes and capital gains on investments. They had concluded that the richest four hundred Americans, whose average wealth was $6.7 billion, had seen their effective tax rate cut by more than half since 1962—from 54 percent to 23 percent. Over the same period, those in the bottom half, who earned about $18,500 a year, had seen their tax burden increase, from 22.5 percent to 24 percent.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Part of why individuals like Benioff could crow about giving back was because of how comprehensively they had taken to begin with. They had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers—the schools that educated their employees; the internet, developed by publicly funded research; the roads, the bridges, and the rest of modern infrastructure, which enabled commerce—and then deployed their lobbyists, accountants, and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Schwarzman and his fellow Davos Men were not satisfied with mere wealth. They demanded that society ratify their privilege as morally sound.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. —Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“In some places, especially Scandinavian countries, those harmed by trade saw the damage limited and repaired by government programs. The state trained workers for new careers when they lost jobs while helping them with their bills while they were out of work. But in the United States, spending on social safety net programs had been gutted as Davos Man shrunk his tax bill.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“By the time the pandemic arrived, the United States had 924,000 hospital beds15, down from nearly 1.5 million in the mid-1970s. In the twenty-five metropolitan areas16 that had absorbed the greatest consolidation, the price of a hospital stay had increased by as much as half.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Not for the first time, Davos Man sought to preserve his ability to take advantage of customers by provoking fear of the very mischief he was engaged in, while spinning the proposed regulatory fix as the source of the treachery.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man