Book Review: “COVID-19: The Great Reset” (2020)
Despite the criticism, the tract from Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret remains frustratingly nondescript when it comes to post-coronavirus solutions.
By: James Swift
One can’t help but feel that the right-of-center rancor directed at Covid: 19: The Great Reset stems largely from people who never bothered actually reading the treatise from Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret in the first place.
And that’s evident by the scores of negative comments on the book’s Amazon page.
The top-rated review calls the book “a plot to subvert American democracy.” Another one-star review describes the tome as “opportunistic malfeasance by the Davos ‘elites.’” Yet another one-star review sums up the title as “a pro-communist piece of trash” that “tries to sway the reader into NWO thinking.”
Then there’s the all-caps diatribe against the tome penned by an individual assuming the nomme de plume JailBreakOverlander — “COVID IS A HOAX AND THIS SHOWS JUST THAT, COVID WAS USED AS THE MACRO RESET. TO STOP EVERYONE IN THEIR TRACKS, SO THE ELITES CAN REDIRECT AND TAKE CONTROL OVER ALL NATIONS.”
Such caustic comments may lead you to think that The Great Reset is something of an Orwellian guidebook to erecting a technocratic totalitarian state. Alas, the actual book is far less interesting — and descriptive — than all of those disparaging Amazon “reviews” lead on. Ultimately, there’s hardly anything in the Great Reset that hasn’t already been said by the likes of Thomas Friedman decades earlier. Rather, what we get is yet another manifesto urging greater multinational cooperation to combat climate change, with a few quasi-interesting predictions about the impact of COVID-19 on international supply chains sprinkled sporadically throughout the same-old, same-old conjecture about “deglobalization” and “robotic process automation.” It’s a book that makes some interesting observations here and there, but unfortunately, the authors never really seem to roll their myriad musings into a singular point — indeed, if the title actually was meant to be a dystopian despotism how-to manual, its bullet points are far too vague, and unconnected, to be of use to any aspiring autocrat.
Front the outset, it’s apparent that the scope of the book is far too broad, with a scant 200 pages nowhere near enough room to thoroughly mull such nuanced and intricate topics as the economic decoupling of the United States and China, the rise of the surveillance state and the ever-expanding reach of big tech — all key public policy issues that could easily serve as the basis of their own post-COVID dissertation.
If there’s anything of a nut graph to the book, the authors make it known fairly early on. “Societies could be poised to become either more egalitarian or more authoritarian, or geared towards more solidarity or more individualism, favoring the interests of the few or the many.” The problem, however, is that Schwab and Malleret never really cut into the specifics of how post-COVID societies could traverse those divergent paths, instead giving readers the usual ill-defined warnings about the perils of biodiversity loss and urban planning failure. At certain points, it almost feels like the book is a bit of a bait-and-switch, with the authors seemingly only using the COVID-19 topic as a springboard to yammer on and on about their desires for global action on climate change. Really, you could just reread Hot, Flat and Crowded — penned in 2008, mind you — and get about 80 percent of the same arguments posited by this treatise.
That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have some interesting components to it, of course. One passage of note involves the authors’ suspicions regarding modern monetary theory (MMT), which they suggest is a one-way ticket to hyper currency depreciation.
“MMT runs like this: governments will issue some debt that the central bank will buy. If it never sells it back, it equates to monetary finance: the deficit is monetized (by the central bank purchasing the bonds that the government issues) and the government can use the money as it sees fit,” the authors state. “The idea is appealing and realizable, but it contains a major issue of social expectations and political control: once citizens realize that money can be found on a ‘magic money tree,’ elected politicians will be under fierce and relentless public pressure to create more and more, which is when the issue of inflation kicks in.”
Yeah — not exactly a resounding endorsement of perpetual quantitative easing, is it?
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| Whatever the opposite of a Gordian knot is, it's probably this diagram. |
Indeed, the book’s sections that are focused strictly on the economic ramifications of COVID-19 are easily the most insightful and enlightening aspects of The Great Reset, as the authors make their case for why the coronavirus crisis spells the end of “neoliberalism” as we know it as well as the death knell for “market fetishism” as a whole. It’s not until the book migrates into discussions about the far-reaching impact of the pandemic on systemic inequalities that the authors seem to lose their focus, as they hop to and fro on concepts like “biographical availability” and “market-oriented” public benefits without bothering to make a sustained, concrete case for or against any specific public policy initiative.
The section on the geopolitical consequences of COVID-19 are similarly disappointing, with the authors gloom-mongering over a potential “global order deficit” that could witness the dissolution of the European Union, the mass failure of petrostates around the world and — of course — heightened tensions between the United States and China.
“If we do not improve the functioning and legitimacy of our global institutions, the world will soon become unmanageable and very dangerous,” the authors warn. “There cannot be a lasting recovery without a global strategic framework of governance.”
Of course, therein lies the biggest problem of the entire book — the fact that the authors fail to even outline a rudimentary sketch of what that “global strategic framework” could resemble. The best Scwab and Malleret can do, it appears, is simply ask that nuclear-armed rivals do a better job communicating with one another — the kind of it-goes-without-saying non-solution that makes you wonder what they’re teaching people at Harvard and the University of Fribourg, exactly.
Following a brief discussion about the intrusive digital tracing measures enacted by countries like China and South Korea, the authors soon delve into a fairly boring conversation about the impact of quarantine and lockdowns on mental health and traditional service sector employers — all stuff you’ve already heard about, and more in-depth, elsewhere.
The section on industrial resilience in the face of COVID-19, however, is pretty engaging, if only for the authors’ fairly blunt — and hardly arguable — assertion that “big tech” was the biggest winner in the fallout of the pandemic.
“During the pandemic, as companies and their customers alike were forced to go digital, accelerate online plans, take up new networking tools and start working from home, tech became an absolute necessity, even among traditionally reluctant customers,” they write. “For this reason, the combined market value of the leading tech companies hit record after record during the lockdowns, even rising back above levels before the outbreak started.”
Inevitably, the book would have to at least obliquely address the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which they suggest “reflect the urgent necessity to embark on the Great Reset,” further arguing that there is a “systemic connectivity” between epidemiological risks and societal risks. Indeed, the authors drive home two key talking points concerning that particular juxtaposition of public policies: “Our human actions and reactions are not rooted in statistical data but are determined instead by emotions and sentiments” and “as our human condition improves, our standards of living increase and so do our expectations for a better and fairer life.”
Hardly controversial takes, for sure, but once again the authors never really go out of their way to further expound upon the direct initiatives and internationally-informed solution sets they believe are the cures for what ails us epidemiologically or socially. Rather, they simply default to their vague preferences for “greater collaboration and cooperation” and “shared intentionality,” sans the need to elucidate on what precise course of actions are required to achieve such lofty ideals.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about “The Great Reset” comes in the final few pages, in which the authors more or less paint COVID-19 as a comparatively minor pandemic when pushed shoulder to shoulder — or, perhaps more accurately, protein to protein — with such virological disasters as the Spanish flu and the Plague of Justinian. Still, the authors contend that while the coronavirus is far, far less deadly than the Black Plague or HIV/AIDS, its challenges are nonetheless different than any encountered in human history. Which, ultimately, leads to this interesting — yet, once again, infuriatingly nondescript, summarization:
“It does not constitute an existential threat or a shock that will leave its imprint on the world’s population for decades. However, it does entail worrisome perspectives for all the reasons already mentioned; in today’s interdependent world, risks conflate with each other, amplifying their reciprocal effects and magnifying their consequences. Much of what’s coming is unknown, but we can be sure of the following — in the post-pandemic world, questions of fairness will come to the fore, ranging from stagnating real incomes for a vast majority to the redefinition of our social contracts.”
By the time I wrapped up The Great Reset, it became clear to me that something so unparalleled and impactful in modern geopolitics could not be properly addressed this early on in the pandemic. In many ways, we’re still feeling the gravitational effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and if our top socioeconomics specialists are still incapable of penning the definitive tome on that subject matter, it’s reasonable to assume that we won’t have truly comprehensive, historical literature on the political and cultural repercussions of the coronavirus crisis for decades and decades.
As an early shot in the dark — the book was published in midsummer, just months after the COVID-19 crisis became entrenched in America — The Great Reset is interesting, no doubt, but as an obvious polemic it’s simply too abstract and directionless to serve of any profound significance, as either an analytical screed or a conjectural blueprint for intragovernmental policy.
As an off the cuff response to the global crisis, The Great Reset isn’t a boring read, but as a call for sociopolitical action, I’m afraid this one is a considerable disappointment. And for those who are still convinced that the book is meant to serve as some sort of one world government handbook, I have to ask — how in the hell would anybody be able to build a monolithic global hegemony out of directions so indistinct.?
Forget describing The Great Reset is a nefarious endeavor — for a book with ideology this inchoate, the term nebulous is a far more fitting descriptor.
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