Ideas - Why a proposed 'new capitalism' is so contested

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

It’s loathed and celebrated, by both the left and right. It's called The Great Reset. To conspiracy theorists, it's a plot by global elites at the World Economic Forum to control our lives. To its supporters, it represents a gentler, more humane form of capitalism. IDEAS contributor Ira Basen lays out the origins, its aims and its potential, for both good and ill. *This episode originally aired on May 23, 2023.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The streets of Ottawa are filled with horn honking, flag-waving, sign-carrying protesters. Some signs are directed predictably at COVID vaccines, mask mandates, and lockdowns. But other signs proclaim opposition to, less familiar targets. Like one reading, we reject your Great Reset, and another saying, the Great Resist. The object of these protesters' displeasure is The Great Reset, an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum, best known for its annual meeting at the fancy Swiss ski resort

of Davos. The Great Reset may be its most far-reaching and controversial performance. proposal yet. This is worse than Nazism. This is worse than communism. This is worse than fascism. These guys are planning on taking over the whole world. Their goal is to literally get us to eat insects and lab-grown fake meat. And one of the ways they're achieving that is by collapsing the current farming.

It is a great reset. A Chinese type of capitalism where the top has capitalism and wealth. elites, the state, and the rest of us live under socialism. It's easy to dismiss the Great Reset because of conspiracy theories like these, but that'd be a mistake. It's a real plan, one that it essentially remake our social and economic order in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Its supporters include some of the richest and most powerful people in the world who say

their plan will solve many of the planet's biggest problems, climate change, change, income inequality, and environmental destruction. On the other side, are many smart, thoughtful people from across the political spectrum who believe the Great Reset represents an existential threat to democracy, personal liberty, and economic freedom. The challenging thing for me is that I think most of what the Great Reset proposes, a world that's fairer, more equitable and more sustainable, where businesses about more than maximizing profit. These are all ideas that I can easily sign up for. Contributor Ira Basin brings us his

documentary, The Great Reset. The question is, do I really trust the people in Davos to deliver that? After all, they're among the people who are most responsible for creating many of these problems in the first place. Why should I believe them now? And that is why I've made it clear that my ministers and my government will be banned from participating in the world economic forum when I'm covering. That's Pierre Paul Yev, speaking to a rally of Conservative Party supporters in 2022. Work for Canada. Work for Canada. If you want to go to Davos to the conference, make it a one-way ticket. But you can't be part of our government and working for a policy agenda that is against the interests of our people. What those conservative partisans might not have known,

but Mr. Polyev surely did know, was that hundreds of Canadians have attended world. Economic Forum meetings in Davos over the years. They included politicians from every party, as well as representatives from business, media, academia, and NGOs. He would also have known that dozens more Canadians, including some of his former cabinet colleagues, were connected to the World Economic Forum through its Young Global Leaders Program. And until the Great Reset came along, being associated with the W.E.F. was never an issue. In fact, going to Davos and hobnobbing with the global elite was seen as a worthwhile thing for a Canadian politician to do. Not anymore. At least, not for Pierre Paulyev. I've never been to Davos. My policies are different. I obviously support small government, more freedom.

I just have a fundamental disagreement with the organization's policy outlook. During the 2022 trucker convoy, Pierre Paulyev organized a Stop the Great Reset petition. It proclaimed that, quote, Canadians must fight back against global elites, preying on the fears and desperation of people to impose their power grab, unquote. Canadian conservatives are following other so-called populist parties around the world by attacking the WEF. They hope to ride the wave of anger. at elites, and they have the Great Reset in their sites. But what exactly is the Great Reset?

The current global crisis has disrupted every aspect of our lives. But it has also presented us with an extraordinary opportunity, a chance to reset and accelerate efforts to improve the state of our world. The Great Reset was launched with much virtual fanfare in June 2020, just as the world was going into COVID-Lynolds. lockdown. One of his most enthusiastic early backers was a future king. We need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace. The only limit is our willingness to act. Four months into the pandemic, the

World Economic Forum was already deep into its planning for a post-pandemic world. The driving force behind the initiative was Klaus Schwab, the 85-year-old founder and executive chairman of the W.E.F. Now is the historical moments a time to shape the system. We can build a new social contract. We can change our behavior to be in harmony with nature again. We need a great reset. The Great Reset was launched with this video. It opened with a with scenes of global dysfunction, congested cities, melting ice flows, COVID patients filling up hospitals. There's no dialogue in the video, but the on-screen messages are dramatic. The first one reads, now is the time to set the reset button on capitalism, transforming

everything about our society to build a better world. And then, our planet stands at an historic crossroads. As climate change threatens entire ecosystems, inequality threatens the foundations of society, all in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed how unfair our world has become to so many. Now at this point you may be thinking this video couldn't possibly have come from the World Economic Forum. Proud home to the world's richest people, the point 0.001%. But it does. The people who have benefited most from our current version of capitalism are now saying it's not working, that has created too much inequality and global destruction, and it needs to be reset. And the main source of resistance to this idea is coming from the very

people who've spent the past several decades getting the short end of the economic stick. It's an upside-down world. And to understand why these global elites are wanting to bite the hand that's fed them so well for so long, we need to take a closer look inside the World Economic Forum. The global elite are gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Ski Town attracts CEOs, billionaires, and celebrities for a week of discussions. on income inequality, climate change, and so much more. The World Economic Forum is best known for its annual January meeting in Davos, Switzerland. But there's a lot more to the WEF than that.

It's a year-round organization based in Geneva with offices around the world. It produces useful research about the climate crisis, women's equality, and other important issues. Despite its lofty title, the WEF isn't an internationally recognized body, like the World Bank or the World Health or World Health or World. World Trade Organizations. It describes itself as an international not-for-profit, non-governmental group. And it's still run by the man who founded it more than 50 years ago, Klaus Schwab. The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the states of the world.

How Schwab has never held elected office, and he wields no formal power, but he's revered by many of the world's most important people. It's his vision for the future that informs everything the World Economic Forum does, and the roots of that vision lie in the chaos and devastation of post-World War II Germany. A disarmed Germany with no more need for army helmets, makes them into pots and pans. But revival of normal German production has been painfully slow. Klaus Schwab came of age at a time when young Germans were struggling to shape

a new future for themselves and their country, one that would avoid the horrors of the past. That meant a commitment to internationalism over nationalism and cooperation over confrontation. And for young Klaus, it also meant a belief in the power of entrepreneurship. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial

atmosphere. My father was a business leader. And I think that influenced me very much. I always felt that entrepreneurship is a key element, not only to create economic development, but also social progress. But entrepreneurs alone could not build the New Germany. Everyone with a stake in the future, governments, business, workers, civil society groups, NGOs, they all had to work together. And he decided that the answers to life's problems was a combination of government and private industry, and that he would catalyze this process of fixing the world's problems by convening academics at first, but eventually heads of state, various experts in this otherwise unremarkable town of Davos high up in the Swiss Alps.

Peter Goodman is the global economics correspondent for the New York Times, and the author of a book called Davos Man, about the WEF and the global elites who support it. The first Davos conference was held in January 1971. It was called the European Management Symposium. Hundreds of business leaders and academics discussed how governments and private industry could work together not just to promote prosperity, but to promote the idea that prosperity could help create a better world. By the 1980s, after it was rebranded the World Economic Forum, the meeting began attracting celebrities and world leaders. Schwab's genius was he convened these proceedings under this mantra, committed to improving

the state of the world, which is kind of an amazing slogan for an institution that attracts by any reasonable measure, the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo. And so he sold attendance to the forum as a way to sort of virtue signal. You know, your mere presence there showed that you were on the right side of history. And then he was a master networker. He convinced lots of rich and famous people that other rich and famous people would be there. And so he turned the forum into something that you really couldn't miss. These days, the annual Davos meeting attracts a few thousand invited guests from business, politics, the arts, civil society, and media.

Funding is provided by the roughly 1,000 W.EF members and partners, which include most of the world's biggest companies and richest individuals. Membership and partnership fees run from about $100,000 Canadian dollars to more than a million. There's lots of networking and many private discussions and corridors and back rooms, but most of the main panels and speeches are available online. If there's a conspiracy for world domination being hatched at Davos, it's a pretty open one. No grand policy proclamations emerge from these meetings. Their real impact lies elsewhere. Where they have impact is giving the billionaire class a platform to convince us that they are the good guys. And here they are at Davos having these earnest discussions about things that we all care about.

I mean, I've seen at Davos, just to give you an example, pharmaceutical industry CEOs convened in a room. discussing, you know, why are drug prices so unaffordable? And these CEOs who know the answer are sitting in the room, you know, having these earnest conversant, well, you know, maybe we haven't come up with the right messaging, we haven't struck the right models, we need to put more thought into this. You know, it's never, well, we've rigged the system through our monopoly control over our products, where capitalizing publicly financed resource to create products that are vital and then jacking up the prices so that no one can afford them.

Like that's not something that you'll hear said in a panel discussion at Davos because the whole artifice of it depends upon if you're there, you're a well-intentioned person displaying your interest in solving the problems of the world. And that's the most important function of Davos. It's that alternative to regulation, to antitrust enforcement, to progressive taxation. It's the billionaires basically saying, we've got this. I really strongly believe that capitalism as we know it is dead, that we're going to see a new kind of capitalism. That's Mark Benioff speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting in 2019.

Benioff is the co-founder and CEO of the software giant Salesforce. force. And one of the people Peter Goodman identifies as a quintessential Davos man. Capitalism has been very good to Mark Benioff. His company is currently valued at about $190 billion, and his net worth is estimated at about $7 billion. And yet, here he is extolling the virtues of what he calls a new kind of capitalism. And that new kind of capitalism that's going to merge is not just about making money. And if your orientation is just about making money, I don't think you're going to hang out very long

as a CEO or a founder of a company. You have to be more than that in today's world. The new kind of capitalism that Mark Benioff is advocating has actually been around since the 1970s. That's when Klaus Schwab began promoting the idea of stakeholder capitalism. Instead of just trying to make money for their shareholders, CEOs would also consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, and communities.

So if they had an opportunity to make an investment in something that could make a lot of money, but might harm other stakeholders, they'd choose not to do it. That's a pretty radical departure from the ideology of American business that prevailed for most of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It was probably best expressed by the rapacious capitalist Gordon Gecko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed is good.

Greed is right. Greed works. But today, CEOs at the World Economic Forum, like Mark Benioff, are singing from a different hymn book. After the financial meltdown of 2008, after Occupy Wall Street, after years of stagnant wage growth, low social mobility, the growing climate crisis, jobs moving offshore, the middle class shrinking and the super rich getting much, much richer. And after political upheavals on the right from politicians like Donald Trump and on the left from the likes of Bernie

Sanders, after all that, it was time for a rethink. Gride was out. Caring and sharing was in. In August 2019, the U.S. Business Roundtable, made up of the country's top CEOs, issued a statement about the purpose of the corporation. After 50 years of insisting that corporations existed to serve shareholders, they now fully embraced a capitalism that served stakeholders. They even supported an increase in the minimum wage for the first time ever. How exactly stakeholder capitalism would work in the real world wasn't spelled out. But by the fall of 2019, two things had become clear. One, the titans of the corporate world

appear to be committed to reinventing capitalism and using their companies as instruments of social change. And two, they'd work closely with government to achieve that goal. Klaus Schwab's vision had never been closer to being realized. And then this happened. Concern is growing this morning over an outbreak of a new SARS-like virus in China. At least Six people have died from the Wuhan coronavirus, and there are nearly 300 confirmed cases. We all know what happened next. Millions of people around the world got sick and died. Lockdowns were imposed, then vaccine and mask mandates.

Economic life came to a screeching halt. Many people wondered not just when the emergency would end, but what a post-pandemic world would look like. Enter the Great Reset. It's now a historical moment, a crucial moment, to rebuild the future, to reset our policies, and we have to build a world which is more resilient, more inclusive, and also more sustainable. For years, the World Economic Forum had been looking for the right moment to advance its agenda, including resetting the button on capitalism. And with the coming of the pandemic, that moment had arrived.

The Great Reset is not about specific policy proposals. Instead, there's lots of vague talk about reimagining, redesigning, and rebalancing our lives. Business and government working in harmony to produce a kinder, gentler world, one more in tune with nature. Happiness won't be solely defined by monetary gain. We might even all just gather around a big global fire and sing kumbaya. but not everyone was on board. These people are wildly out of touch. They are elites and they are designing everything, everything in your life.

Glenn Beck is a right-wing American media star and the author of a book called The Great Reset, Joe Biden and the Rise of 21st Century Fascism. That is the thing about the Great Reset. Everyone is a stakeholder and it is a complete. fleet and run around the Constitution, around all governments, and there will be another emergency that they will use to finally grab that rope and pull it taunt around our necks. Glenn Beck is one of several members of the far-right American media ecosystem who've written books attacking the Great Reset. Another is the convicted liar Alex Jones, whose book is called

The Great Reset and the War for the World. They admit their plan. You'll own nothing, you'll have nothing, will end the family, will grow humans in artificial looms, everyone will be pre-programmed. They want a full corporate takeover of humanity, and that's what the Great Reset is. It's corporate fascist using a communist ideology to control people. It's easy to dismiss Beck and Jones as outrageous conspiracy theorists. They make a very good living by distorting facts and striking fear in the hearts of their audiences. But when it comes to the Great Reset, there are a very good living.

inflammatory rhetoric does actually contain shards of truth. Here's why. The Great Reset is being sold as a fundamental disruption of our economic order, brought to you by the very people who have benefited most from that order. Those plutocrats say they've now found enlightenment, but until they prove it, skepticism is the most appropriate response. And there's more to Klaus Schwab's agenda than just reforming capitalism. There's also the question of who gets to control powerful new technologies, like robotics, gene editing, and artificial intelligence, which are already affecting how we live and work. Klaus Schwab likes to say we've entered the fourth industrial revolution. He thinks these new technologies will make us more creative and more willing to work together

to solve the world's problems. But every revolution brings winners and losers, and outside the Davos bubble, talk about brain implants and microchips begins to sound a lot more like control than liberation. The Great Reset will dramatically expand the surveillance state via real-time tracking. Ron Paul is a libertarian and a former Republican member of Congress. Included in Schwab's proposal for surveillance is his idea to use brain scans to predict and, if necessary, prevent individuals' future behavior. It will also mandate that people receive digital certificates

in order to travel and even technology implanted in their bodies to monitor them. Now, none of this has actually been proposed by Klaus Schwab, but the Fourth Industrial Revolution will almost certainly mean more surveillance from lots of different sources. For millions of people like Ron Paul, who distrust big government as much as they do big business, traditional remedies like more regulation and greater government oversight have little appeal. For them, the pandemic and the Great Reset have laid bare the true agenda of the global corporate and government elite. They believe the globalists are trying to control every aspect of our lives.

The pandemic was a manufactured crisis. The lockdowns and mandates were attacks against our fundamental freedoms. And the worst is yet to come. Even more draconian measures will be imposed to counter another manufactured crisis, this time over climate. This profound distrust of big government and big business is what drives much of the opposition to the Great Reset by people on the right. You can hear it echoed in the attacks on the WEF by conservative leader Pierre Pahliev. We should be standing up against. government power grabs, like this grand reset the prime minister is discussing. This is not a time

to re-engineer society and for government to take advantage of the crisis in order to massively expand its powers at the expense of Canadian's freedom. Few governments in the Western world are more closely linked to the World Economic Forum than the liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Klaus Schwab even boasted about it after a visit to Canada in 2017. What we are very proud of now is a young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau said we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I would know that half of this cabinet are actually young nobility is of the World Economic Forum.

The phrase penetrating the cabinet doesn't sit well with Canadian critics of the World Economic Forum. neither does the prominent role of finance minister and deputy prime minister Christia Freeland in W.EF circles. She attended the annual meeting many times in her previous life as a financial journalist. She even wrote a book in 2012 about global plutocrats. But today she's the ultimate WEF insider, the only Canadian currently serving on the organization's board of trustees. As for her boss, the prime minister, he's never definitively said that he supports the Great Reset, but he's come about as close as you can get. Canada believes that a strong, coordinated response

across the world and across sectors is essential. This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. That video of Justin Trudeau speaking to a UN meeting in September 2020 has been shared and retweeted millions of times by W.EF critics in Canada and around the world. They jumped on his use of the word reset, arguing it was proof that the Great Reset had accepted, extended its reach into the highest levels of government. Since then, the prime minister has managed to

avoid using the word reset in public, but there's little question about where he stands. He'll use the buzzwords of inclusion, equality, and sustainability, but he's vague on the details. What exactly are elected officials saying when they want to rewarns with economic systems, they want to build from the ground up, the great reset, what do these things ultimately mean? Rupa Subramanya is a conservative columnist and podcaster. She's frustrated by the Trudeau government's reluctance to talk about their apparent support for the Great Reset. These ideas are not exactly bubbling up from the ground, right?

There's not a grassroots movement in Canada that I'm aware of, which is asking us to reimagine economic systems. They're from being promoted by what I think are a technocratic elite. You look at the Liberals campaign platform from 2021. One, there's really no mention of the Great Reset or these ideas that we should be debating. And I think there's a good reason for that because I think the average voter probably would be very alarmed at this kind of stuff. Reimagining everything, building everything from the ground up. If you think that stakeholder capitalism is, you know, so incredibly important for the future of society,

should be part of the liberal campaign platform, but it isn't. You're listening to Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Depending on whom you talk to, the Great Reset is either the solution to our planet's problem, or a threat to our most cherished freedoms. This initiative by the World Economic Forum has spawned a wave of conspiracy theories

and divided Canadian politicians. To help untangle what it means and doesn't mean, we continue now with contributor Ira Basin and his documentary, The Great Reset. The Goals of the United Reset. The Goals of the United States. the Great Reset, to create a society that's fairer, healthier, and more sustainable, are shared by large numbers of Canadians. So why are politicians like Justin Trudeau so reluctant to talk

about their support for it? Politics is surely part of the reason, linking arms with Klaus Schwab and the Davos elite, is not a good look these days. But there are other reasons, and they center on the core idea behind the Great Reset, stakeholder capitalism. My name is Guy Carmier, and I am the chairman and CEO of Desjardin Group. The Desjardin Group is a Montreal-based financial services cooperative, which manages over $91 billion in assets. And Guy Cormier is one of Canada's biggest boosters of stakeholder capitalism. For me, it's stakeholder capitalism is having two principles in your mind.

The first one is when we take a decision or when we work on a project, always having in mind the best decision for the future generation. And the second principle is the impact on communities, on people. So having in mind, when I take a decision, when I work on a project, when I look at the strategic future of my company, what's the impact on communities where I'm working in or with? What's missing from Guy Cormier's definition of stakeholder capitalism is the impact his decisions will have on his company's bottom line. He believes traditional capitalism's preoccupation with maximizing profit has gotten us to the precarious position we currently find ourselves in.

We have built a capitalism in a way where we use the resources in a mindset where they will be always available and there is no prize for these resources. But now we know very well that with too much consumption, too much capitalism, It's quite obvious that there is more inequalities, there is more pollution. We've seen some peoples who are losing fate in institution, in democracy. So when you all put that all together, maybe there's something that we must change in capitalism. Something must change in capitalism.

That's a statement that both free market capitalists on the right and critics of corporate capitalism on the left can agree with. But is stakeholder capitalism the answer? The phrase means different things to different people. But whatever variation it takes, stakeholder capitalism rests on two key assumptions. The first is that giant corporations and democratically elected governments share a wide range of common interests, and together with civil society groups,

they can work together to achieve their goals. The second is that capitalism is capable of morphing into a more benign form, where success is measured by something other than how much money you make. Well, people have been asking me, why am I wearing this black suit? And it's because I'm at a funeral for capitalism here in Davos. Mark Beniof, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, came to Davos in 2020 not to praise capitalism, but to bury it, and herald a new enlightened age. We are introducing a new capitalism here, a stakeholder capitalism. The old capitalism, you know, is all about the business, a business is money, money, money.

The new stakeholder capitalism is, business is the greatest platform for change. Mark Benioff likes to boast about all the ways his company is making the world a better place. He gives hundreds of millions of dollars to support public schools, help the homeless, and other worthwhile causes. He says his company has achieved net zero in carbon emissions and that his women employees get equal pay for work of equal value. And he refers to all his employees, as his Ohana, the Hawaiian word for family.

His shareholders have benefited as well. If you bought Salesforce shares when the company went public in 2004, you'd now be up almost 5,000 percent. We can do it all. We can have super high revenue, super high profit, super high cash flow, and we can manage for all stakeholders. That means we're managing for our employees,

our customers, our communities, are homeless, and yes, the planet is a key stakeholder as well. 2021 was a very good year for Mark Benioff and Salesforce. The shift to remote work and learning boosted sales of the company's software to record levels. Its stock hit an all-time high, and more than 25,000 new workers were added to the company's Ohana. But one of the immutable laws of capitalism is that good times don't last forever. In 2022, even though gross profits were still a healthy $20 billion,

sales force revenues were down, costs were up, and the company's stock dropped nearly 50%. Shares of other tech companies like meta, Google, and Shopify were also on the skids. They responded by shedding many of the extra workers they had hired during the pandemic, egged on by stock market watchers like Jim Kramer on CNBC. But at the end of the day, this market has become unforgiving to the fat, happy tech companies that hired too many people during the pandemic and are now seeing that they're not taking the tough actions needed to protect you, you the shareholder. So despite all that dreamy talk about stakeholder capitalism, it was still sharing.

shareholders who ruled the corporate world. Capitalism was still about money, money, money, even at Salesforce. You can probably guess what happened next. Well, we do have some breaking news this morning. Salesforce shares are actually moving higher after announcing job cuts. Software giant plans reduce its workforce by about 10%. It will also reduce office space. In January 2023, Mark Benioff announced that Salesforce would be cutting jobs,

about 8,000 of them. Wall Street was impressed. shares climbed about 40% in the first quarter. And when the CEO emerged to speak to Bloomberg TV, he was no longer sounding like a man who believed shareholder capitalism was dead and buried. We have taken drastic actions, and we've really made an incredible transformation here.

You can see 29.2% margin for the quarter. You can see we had record revenue levels. These incredible financial performances is really the result of the great work of all our hona, toys and we're continuing to deliver great results for our shareholders. Great results for our shareholders. What the Salesforce story reveals is that profit and share price are still the metrics that define business success. They're easy to calculate and everyone understands them. Measuring how successful a company is at saving the world is a whole lot trickier. Enter ESG.

That stands for environment. environmental, social, and governance. It's supposed to give investors and others a way to measure how a company's policies are contributing to fighting climate change, increasing the diversity of its workforce, treating its customers and suppliers more fairly, and so on. For Klaus Schwab and other fans of stakeholder capitalism, ESG is a critical step towards resetting the button on capitalism, moving towards a world where profit doesn't always come first. But can investors really be weaned away from focusing exclusively on the bottom line. ESG supporters like Desjardin CEO Guy Cormier believes that's already starting to happen.

When I look at Desjardin, our members and clients, the younger generations are asking us now to bring products for them, where they know that they invest in a way where they have a lesser impact on the environment. So not that they don't want returns. they want returns, but is it only financial returns? Or can we implement a definition of returns that is not necessarily based on financials? So that's where I feel that it's in the next five, ten years. Yes, the returns will be important, but not necessarily as the number one factor.

The road to get to the promised land that Guy Cormier envisions will be long and bumpy. Some of those bumps have already started to appear. The upshot of all this is we want to stop these kind of masters of the universe from trying to do through economic power what they cannot achieve at the ballot box. And here in Florida, I want to be governed by the values of Destin, not the values of Davos. Republican politicians in the U.S. like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have declared that no government money can be deposited in funds that adhere to ESG principles. They dismiss ESG as woke capitalism. Some business leaders agree. Elon Musk says the S and ESG

stands for satanic. And then there's Glenn Beck. ESG has to be stopped right now because that is the control of your business, of your money, of absolutely everything in your life. Warning, that is the fascistic system that will trickle down to you. Even supporters of ESG recognize there's lots of confusion about how to measure if a company is actually doing what it says it's doing. There are hundreds of different rating systems in use. None are widely accepted. Many are contradictory. Depending on how you measure it, a fossil fuel company with lots of diversity among their employees could have a better ESG score than a company that makes electric cars with a less diverse workforce. You can see where this gets pretty complicated. An initiative to streamline ESG metrics is in the works.

It's a plan to measure stakeholder capitalism that companies can actually report on regardless of their industry or region. The World Economic Forum is one of many organizations working to standardize ESG scoring. It wants to make environmental, social, and governance numbers on a company's balance sheet as clear and widely accepted as calculations of profit and loss. But even the most optimistic projections put us several years away from material. achieving that goal. In the meantime, Klaus Schwab will continue to focus on that other critical element of stakeholder capitalism, the need for public and private sectors to work closely together to promote

the common good. We know today that the challenges which we face cannot be solved by governments alone. They cannot be solved by business alone. or by civil society alone. What we need is multi-stakeholder cooperation to shape our future. But who gets to sit at the multi-stakeholder table? Everyone agrees that business needs to be there, but the CEOs of the giant global corporations who show up at Davos every year

don't speak for the entire business community. Over the past few decades, it's been their companies who have benefited most from policies that favor lower trade barriers, reduce taxation, and deregulation. The voices of small and medium-sized businesses and businesses that have been decimated by globalization are rarely heard at the World Economic Forum. Workers are supposed to be another important stakeholder,

but who speaks for them? Historically, that role has been filled by union leaders. But the welcome mat has not been rolled out for organized labor in Davos. In fact, many of the CEOs who like to talk about partnerships with their employees are at the same time waging fierce campaigns to prevent their workers from unionizing. And what about civil society groups? We know that environmental organizations all want to fight climate change,

but they have radically different strategies of how to do it. There are divisions among indigenous groups over resource development on their traditional lands. There are also a lot of communities. groups, NGOs, foundations, and other organizations with legitimate claims to be included in multi-stakeholder partnerships. First of all, who are the stakeholders? Who defines the stakeholders? And then how much influence should they have? I thought we had governments that were democratically elected. They should be the ones. Joel Klotkin is a fellow in urban geography at Chapman University

in California. His most recent book is called The Coming of Neo-Feedle a warning to the global middle class. What's happening is that these very wealthy people fund nonprofits. The nonprofits then fund community groups. The community groups become the stakeholders. So the stakeholders aren't the legislature. They're not the city council. The stakeholders are a group of people who the oligarchs decide are the right stakeholders.

And I just don't think that we should forget that we have a constitutional democracy. and that we have a government to restrict the greed of the very rich and the exaggerated power of a few. That's why we have a government. And what's happening is the governments really don't want to really contradict these powerful interests, and they don't want to offend their constituents or they do nothing. The partnership between government and business is a critical element of stakeholder capitalism. But perhaps even more critical is the question who gets to call the shots in these partnerships.

Joel Kotkin calls himself an old-fashioned social democrat. He thinks governments should be setting the agenda and enlisting the help of business when it's appropriate. But that's not how many of the CEOs at Davos see it. We have to take action, and we can't just say government is going to take action because we know that government is mostly you know, not very effective today.

That's Mark Benioff again, this time, at the World Economic Forum in 2021. We as business leaders have to take personal responsibility and start to say, what is it that we're going to do each and every one of us on the major issues that we know that we can make change. And look, we have more power and more capability than ever, but business has to have that level of responsibility. Mark Benioff was speaking. to a virtual meeting of the WEF because in 2021, the pandemic prevented the annual get-together

in Davos. For Beniof and other CEOs, the pandemic was a testing ground for how stakeholder capitalism, led by some of the world's largest corporations, might work in the real world. The early returns were very positive. CEOs are gathering every week to figure out how can we improve the state of the world and get through this pandemic and look against the dysfunction. of governments and non-governmental organizations over the last year. They were not the ones who saved us. It was CEOs in many cases all over the world who were the heroes. They are the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees,

their factories, and pivoted rapidly, not for profit, but to save the world. So the public is counting on CEOs to make the right calls on political and social issues way more than ever before. It's true that in the early days of the pandemic, Mark Benioff did use his business connections in China to secure millions of pieces of personal protection equipment for a San Francisco hospital. Other companies shifted their production lines to produce PPE, and that maneuvering did save lives. And then there were the two drug companies, Pfizer and Moderna, who were celebrated for developing MRNA vaccines in record time. All that played well in the Court of Public Opinion,

where business appears to have emerged from the pandemic in better shape than government. The annual trust barometer, released by the Edelman PR firm in January 2023, showed that globally, corporations are now considered to be more trustworthy and less likely to be sources of false and misleading information, than governments. When he launched the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab was hoping that the pandemic could help change the narrative about business.

That was important because if the public was ever going to come around to the idea of stakeholder capitalism, it needed to be convinced that global corporations were agents of positive social and economic change and not just profit maximizers. Mission accomplished.

We never have seen such an engagement, of large companies as we do now in the crisis, which is a very good time. And now they are doing, the companies are doing it not for whitewashing or greenwashing or whatever. They are doing it nearly out of a motivation which comes from the heart and from the conviction. So the company is not just an economic organism, but a social entity. Inside the Davos bubble, this idea that the pandemic was a triumphant coming out party for stakeholder capitalism plays very well. Outside the bubble, the reviews are mixed. I think what we need to do is not allow a concept to get completely hijacked and used for, you know, sounding good. And unless we see on the ground a

fundamentally different relationship between businesses, communities, workers, and the public sector, then it's all just kind of blah, blah. Mariana Mazukato is a professor of economics at University College, London, and the author of several books on the subject of renewing capitalism. That's gotten her invitations to appear on the stage at Davos several times, but her message is not always what the corporate elites want to hear. She isn't buying the idea that CEOs were the heroes of the pandemic. She points out that many of them failed to provide safe workplaces for their employees, that they cancelled pandemic wage increases

long before the threat of COVID had disappeared, even while they were making record profits and rewarding shareholders by buying back more than a trillion dollars worth of their stock. As for the mRNA vaccines, most of the money to develop them came from public, not private sources. And Pfizer and Moderna refused to share their intellectual property

with the rest of the world. This idea that we can talk about stakeholder value, but when it then comes down to crunch time, we're still trying to maximize profits in the old way. We need to have accountability mechanisms. And I think just the fact that there is one trillion in share buybacks in the last year, of which much of that was done by those same companies that show up at the World Economic Forum and talk about stakeholder value, let's get serious around those kind of metrics. To what degree are profits actually being reinvested back into production, into green production,

into better working conditions, into rewarding workers so that their wages are rising in real terms alongside productivity, actually recognizing that wider social ecosystem that needs to stop being undermined. Marianna Masukato is a big believer in stakeholder capitalism, but not the version being advanced by Mark Benioff that places corporations at the center of the economic and social universe. She rejects the idea that governments lack the organization. and technical skills to deal with challenges like managing a global pandemic and that wealth and value can only be created in the private sector. There's this self-fulfilling prophecy that the more

we bash government or if we're progressives, the more we say that the best that the government can do is fixed market failures, then government is by design, not by coincidence. So it's kind of too little too late, filling the gap of the missing private finance here and there. Whereas a different way of thinking would be that you're actively shaped. and co-creating a different type of economy, making government more capable to create value, but we don't think of government and the civil service as creating values, just there to administer, to redistribute, to enable, or to de-risk the risk-takers in the private sector. In Mariana Mazukato's vision of stakeholder capitalism,

there be no more government bailouts of failing industries or companies without strict conditions on how that money gets spent. No more governments taking a backseat to private sector partners on large infrastructure projects like hospitals, highways, or public transit. No more relying on charity from CEOs to save the planet, or allowing them to determine who gets to be a stakeholder and who doesn't. In other words, no more elected government representatives taking orders from unelected CEOs. Now, that's not a position you'd expect a free market limited government economist like Stephen Globerman to support. He's a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think tank. But he also has problems with the W.F's version of stakeholder capitalism.

He says there's a big difference between limited government intervention and no government at all. I mean, if there are problems with capitalism, why is Klaus Schwab the one to decide how to fix it? I think the view of the World Economic Forum is that it really is up to corporate leaders to be the managers because other people simply aren't doing the job or maybe not capable of doing the job. You know, we have to turn to corporations because they're the only functional organizations in society, which is a very strange thing. If you're going to concede that, you're basically saying democracy doesn't work. We might as well just have a bunch of autocrats deciding what's socially important and what's not.

And that's a very worrisome thing to me. And I don't think they have enunciated the... implications of that and the potential for a lot of harm being done if government essentially is a partner with business, where the business leaders, in a sense, get to set the social agenda. The great promise of stakeholder capitalism, as articulated by the World Economic Forum, is that more voices will come to the table and they'll work together for the benefit of us all. The reality, according to critics like Stephen Gloverman on the right, Mariano Mazukato on the left, and Joel Kotkin in the center,

is that the W.EF's version of stakeholder capitalism will weaken democracy by entrenching the power and influence of corporate elites at the expense of everyone else. Both positions could be true. There's much that's appealed. about the idea of hitting the reset button on capitalism. We have big global problems to solve, and a new capitalism that's concerned with more than maximizing shareholder profit could be really helpful. But we should be very wary about billionaires bearing gifts.

There's little evidence that the Davos crowd is actually prepared to do anything that would significantly shift the balance of power in society in a way that runs counter to their economic self-interest. Still, to discount it all as a conspiracy by global elites to take over the world or to cancel any discussion of it to score political points would be a mistake. The Great Reset began as an attempt to reimagine a post-pandemic world that was more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive. Davos might not be the best place to look to find ways of doing that,

but that doesn't mean we should stop looking. You were listening to The Great Reset by Ira Basin and contributing producer Karen Levine. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval, with additional technical help from Pete Mori. Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.