A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller • An NPR Best Book of the Year
The New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy.
“Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning.” —Evan Osnos
“Excellent. A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one.” —NPR.org
The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism’s triumph in the Cold War to loot the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people, and leaving them tragically unprepared for the worst pandemic in a century.
Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative “Davos Men”—members of the billionaire class—chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man’s wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more.
Goodman’s revelatory exposé of the global billionaire class reveals their hidden impact on nearly every aspect of modern society: widening wealth inequality, the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, the shrinking opportunity to earn a livable wage, the vulnerabilities of our health-care systems, access to affordable housing, unequal taxation, and even the quality of the shirt on your back. Meticulously reported yet compulsively readable, Davos Man is an essential read for anyone concerned about economic justice, the capacity of societies to grapple with their greatest challenges, and the sanctity of representative government.
Peter S. Goodman is the Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times. He was previously the NYT’s European economics correspondent, based in London, and the national economics correspondent, based in New York, where he played a leading role in the paper’s award-winning coverage of the Great Recession, including a series that was a Pulitzer finalist. Previously, he covered the Internet bubble and bust as the Washington Post’s telecommunications reporter, and served as WashPo’s China-based Asian economics correspondent. He is the author of Davos Man and Past Due: The End of Easy Moneyand the Renewal of the American Economy. He graduated from Reed College and completed a master’s in Vietnamese history from the University of California, Berkeley.
Table of Contents
Prologue "They Write the Rules for the Rest of the World" 1
Part I Global Pillage
Chapter 1 "High Up in the Mountains" 19
Chapter 2 "The World that Our Fathers in World War II Wanted Us to Live In" 48
Chapter 3 "Suddenly, The Orders Stopped" 76
Chapter 4 "Our Chance to Fuck them Back" 93
Chapter 5 "It Had to Explode" 120
Chapter 6 "Every Stone I Looked Under was a Blackstone" 144
Chapter 7 "They are Now Licking their Lips" 168
Part II Profiteering Off a Pandemic
Chapter 8 "They are Not Interested in Our Concerns" 183
Chapter 9 "There's Always a Way of Making Money" 195
Chapter 10 "Grossly Underfunded and Facing Collapse" 219
Chapter 11 "We are Actually All One" 228
Chapter 12 "We're Not Safe" 245
Chapter 13 "This is Killing People" 258
Chapter 14 "Is this a Time to Profit?" 284
Chapter 15 "We Will Get 100 Percent of Our Capital Back" 309
Part III Resetting History
Chapter 16 "Not Somebody Who is Going to Disrupt Washington" 329
Chapter 17 "The Money is Right there in the Community Now" 340
Chapter 18 "Put Money in People's Pockets" 351
Chapter 19 "At War Against Monopoly Power" 368
Chapter 20 "Taxes, Taxes, Taxes. The Rest is Bullshit." 382
