Don't blame Davos (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
It’s that special time of year when the global elites gather together at Davos. Or rather it would be, if it weren’t for Covid. Thanks to the Omicron wave, the World Economic Forum 2022 has been postponed.
But don’t despair. Instead of the annual jamboree that you probably couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be invited to, there’s an online event called The Davos Agenda. This opened on Monday with a “special address” by Xi Jinping.
What could be more Davos than China’s communist dictator telling a bunch of virtual capitalists that we should “remove barriers, not erect walls”? Inspirational stuff — and I’m sure a great comfort to the people of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.
For Davos-sceptics, however, this will only confirm suspicions that something has gone very wrong with global capitalism — with the World Economic Forum at the centre of it all. The fact that we’ve exported so much of our productive capacity to China and other countries is one concern. But the bigger worry is about what we’re getting back from the globalised economy.
For Westerners, capitalism is first and foremost a consumer experience. In the 20th century, the system triumphed over its socialist rival because it delivered the goods. After the long, dark centuries of scarcity, we suddenly found ourselves in a time of plenty. We were grateful — but not, let it be noted, pathetically grateful. Indeed, the real clincher for consumer capitalism is that it made us feel strong.
Motorised transport — above all the car — gave us the ability to go where we wanted, when we wanted. Combined with modern construction methods, our newfound mobility also massively expanded the supply of new housing. Space and privacy, previously reserved for the rich became available to the masses.
Then there was the food. Today, we romanticise the kitchen table as the heart of traditional family life. But in most homes it was also a traditional — and very necessary — instrument of rationing. Consumer capitalism transformed the situation. Above all, there was the miracle of meat every day, not just on special occasions; the modern world is defined as much by beef and pork as it is by steel and silicon.
Of course, abundance comes at a cost. There are the obvious downsides of excess; but also our growing distance from the old ways: the rhythms of nature, the bonds of community, the dignity of craftsmanship. Yet we didn’t sacrifice these deep connections in return for mere comfort. Rather, we were offered an alternative form of vitality: the freedom of the road; the mastery of owning one’s home; the visceral satisfaction of unrestricted carnivory. It might seem strange to describe these things as cultural goods, but within a certain set of consumerist values, that’s exactly what they are.
Beyond its merely material comforts, the consumer society — especially the American version — offered an empowered, independent and, dare I say it, manly way of life. Whether or not one approves, the fact is that it gave birth to a distinctive culture — one to which most of us remain attached.
Nonetheless, it’s now under threat. While the global economy produces more than ever, there’s a growing anxiety that the associated sense of empowerment — what could be called the red meat of capitalism — is about to be snatched away from us.
That’s literally the case when it comes to food. One only has to look at the effort being made to promote meat-substitutes. Most distastefully, there’s the argument that we should feed the world on insect protein. A quick search of the World Economic Forum website reveals an obsession with the idea. Here’s a small selection of articles from the last few years: “Worms for dinner? Europe backs insect based food”; “Good grub: why we might be eating insects soon”; and “Fancy a bug burger?”
The house journals of global capitalism, the Financial Times and The Economist, take a similar line. Both publications advocate for entomophagy beneath perky headlines such as “Eating bugs: a culinary idea with legs” and “Why eating insects makes sense”.
Yet a backlash is underway. “I will not eat the bugs!” has become a rallying cry on the alt — and not-so-alt — Right. The golden age of capitalism gave us affordable meat, and there’s a slice of public opinion that’s in no mood to accept substitutes.
We’re not just talking food here, but a whole way of life. Consider the second part of the anti-Davos mantra: “I will not live in the pod!” This refers to the proposition that we should radically rethink how we allocate living space in crowded, unaffordable cities. And by “rethink”, I mean “reduce” — both in terms of floor area and privacy. In place of apartments and houses, a WEF report invites us to consider “tiny homes” (i.e. boxes) and experiments in “shared living” (i.e. dormitories).
Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people.
It’s not difficult to see all this as a process of disempowerment — indeed of emasculation. I’m not surprised to see Right-wingers, especially in the US, leading the backlash. It’s as if some alien force has taken control of capitalism, pulling it in a new and unAmerican direction. I’m also not surprised to see the WEF — with its rhetoric around “The Great Reset” — become a symbol of this apparent change of course.
Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it.
It’s a paradox of productivity. The greater the abundance of goods and services we produce, the greater the number of people who get to enjoy them. Unfortunately, it also means we use up more of the enabling resources that can’t be as easily multiplied. The most obvious example is the car, or rather the space required for cars. There was a time when the freedom of the road really meant something. But as roads fill up, there’s no choice but to impose speed limits, one-way systems, road charging and other measures required to save lives and keep cities moving. Self-driving cars, if and when we get them, are just the next step — a means of reducing driver error and thus making the most of limited road capacity. After all, that’s what free markets are supposed to do: maximise resource efficiency.
The same applies to living space. That too is limited, especially in city centres — and, therefore, we can expect the laws of supply and demand to have their inevitable impact. You may not want to live in a pod, but if that’s all you can afford, then you have a choice: either take the deal or move somewhere less expensive.
Eating the bugs is a yet another response to market forces. Meat is delicious, which is why demand for it is going up as more of the world’s people get rich enough to afford it. Supply responds to demand, but also pushes harder against natural limits — like the availability of land for feed crops. There are ethical concerns too — and so producers and consumers look for alternatives. If you see supermarkets filling their shelves with an ever wider range of meatless meat products, it’s not because someone at Davos told them to.
What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing. And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price.
Of course, that still leaves a lot of good reasons for rejecting the “Davos agenda” — but if you do, then you’re going to have to contemplate a rather more radical break with consumer capitalism. I don’t expect many takers. If the choice is between eating the bugs or eating only carrots, then most people will eat the bugs.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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Subscribe“What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing.”
I feel this article conflates two simultaneous trends. The free market will certainly adjust price to demand and currently many people are feeling the pinch and are learning that resources are finite. I’m not sure, though, that’s what the “Right-wingers” object to (Ah, those nasty Right-wingers are wheeled out of the closet yet again when a bogeyman is needed).
Humanity might be consuming to excess but the Davos set are also actively manipulating this trend (just as they’re capitalizing on the covid crisis) to push an agenda that reduces more people to dependency on institutions controlled by them and the technocrats they empower. That’s what people are pushing back against.
What the Davos set don’t want to do is stop interfering in the political process and allow ordinary people to decide how to deal with the challenges that face them.
“And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price.” **
** This comment brought to you by your good friends at the WEF.
“What the Davos set don’t want to do is stop interfering in the political process and allow ordinary people to decide how to deal with the challenges that face them.”
True, but I am starting to think that it isn’t merely their selfish addiction to power at work here, though doubtless that’s a factor. There is very obviously an emerging attitude amongst modern global elites that is very similar to the aristocratic attitudes of a couple of hundred years ago – the belief that the lower orders are incapable of knowing their own best interests and consequently should not be permitted to make important decisions even on their own behalf, let alone on matters having broader implications.
You would think, given the ever-enlarging set of colossal mistakes that global policy elites make as they gain ever more power to make the decisions that lead to them, that they’d have learnt by now that the only thing they themselves are capable of is screwing things up for everyone else, but the problem is that this is masked by the convenient coincidence that everything they do also makes things better for themselves.
The author paints a picture of a 2049 type world come to life, but none of that tallies with the incontrovertible fact that all of the advanced world is already well below population replacement, and much of the developing world is rapidly heading that way too. For example, a lot of indications already that India has recently crossed the threshold to below 2.1 (which is maintenance level). The big exception is of course Africa. But I no longer expect Africa to hit 4 billion by 2100 – it looks to me even the max African population will top out well below 3 billion. The only mitigation against the global population falling off a cliff, is increasing longevity – and it’s not clear to me how many people will in fact choose to remain alive beyond a century – given that as societal atomisation grows, apart from a small percentage with significant accumulated assets, you will likely end up spending the last quarter of your life institutionalised under the aegis of the state, existing, but with no agency.
The second half of this century will likely be characterised by a quickly declining global population, with individuals surrounded not by people but technology.
I don’t think we’ll be eating bugs or living in pods. I don’t think the dystopian aspect of the next few decades will be resource scarcity, it will be growing nihilism, as the realisation dawns that we have outrun our genetic inheritance, and the only viable route forward entails altering ourselves in response, ie change ourselves, to an extent that humanity is no longer human.
Great essay.
There is always a balance to be struck.
“Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it. “
No particular agenda develops on its own either. Market forces and our own opinions on the direction we should be taking, force certain segments of public to try and come up with a “worldwide” solution. Unfortunately the people who run such forums have much in common with the leaders of left like Stalin and Mao etc. They are elite or become elite and think that entitles them to better answers than the market forces. But the reality is that there are NO answers. There is no one policy that fits all .
If capitalism as we know it is about to take a tumble, then market will be forced to reinvent the goods and services it produces. Change is key to surviving and thriving.
But please Davos, don’t pretend you know better than the market. Or that you can force its direction – It’s heavy interferences of the past that have caused large scale famines & mismanagement & misery as well as the global population to balloon through large scale medical intervention. In the short run it’s easy to see the benefits, in the long run there is a price to pay.
Only light touch is needed as the problems are nuanced and blunt approach is to be avoided at any cost.
We have always lived with problems and we solve them, and this article is rubbish. It discusses capitalism but misses a fundamental issue. Free-market trade is the essential feature of capitalism that ensures it will work for everybody. Now we have state controlled capitalism where politicians think they can control the relationship between production and distribution and that they are entitled to a bigger and bigger slice of the wealth that we create. They think that printing worthless money is wealth creation. Venice collapsed when free-trade was controlled by the Doges. History repeats itself.
Not only that but the biggest stock on the stock market – Tesla, is merely a Carbon Credit Scam – that is the only reason it makes any money, CO2 credits – the market distortions which are more an influence than the consumers now days – ie, the Devos psychopaths are controlling everything.
Each year, WEF attendees try to pretend that last year’s meeting in some way foresaw the era we are now in. Of course it did no such thing. It never does.
Seriously, how is Davos – even “virtual” Davos – still a thing?
I wonder if there were similar inklings of fear and trepidation at Versailles at the start of 1789? A feeling that the future was not looking quite so rosy – but still a godlike belief in their right to rule, a messianic adherence to the agenda they’ve agreed on for the last 20 years and a total misreading of the reasons the peasants seem more revolting than usual for the time of year.
Among the talks on Global Capitalism and the Green New Deal and how it will benefit them, there’ll no doubt be concerns raised at the rising tide of resentment among the plebs at being forced to live in pods and eat bugs, and our growing mistrust of the useful idiots in the media who promote this neo-liberal agenda. But, of course, it’s always a lot easier to muse on the foibles of the minions whilst perched on a Swiss mountain top in a lair full of wanna-be Bond villains, or even just video-conferencing with Blofeld-lite. Yet never once having the self awareness to imagine, Yes, it is you and your cohort of globalists who’ve brought most of this about. That your certainty about the future was unfounded and your ideas detrimental to the common-good.
Hopefully some young entrepreneur is doing a Dragon’s Den style pitch to some of them, “I’m looking for investors into my little company making torches and pitchforks. I think we’re set for a big few years. You might want to get in early …”
The number of cattle in Europe and the US is just 1/5th of the number of Bisson running around North America 250 years ago. As moronic as the environmentalist argument is against meat, I think that should settle any stupid notions that anything has changed for the worse in the “Animals Eating Grass” category.
There are a number of unstated assumptions in this article. The bigest one seems to be that Green New Deal limitations on fossil fuels and meat are required to stave off global warming. Using 100 years of statistical noise to predict global climate cycles that last hundreds or thousands of years is statistically ludicrous. Since in geologic time the paleoclimatology of earth has included both an ice ball earth and an ice free earth, both before man was even a species, it would seem that natural climate variability exceeds that that could be induced by burning fossil fuels and allowing cows to fart methane. The expence of moving to a fossil fuel and meatless world should put a heavy burden of proof on the “experts.” I don’t think they’ve come even close to meeting it.
Malthusian doomsday predictions assume that technology stays constant. However, technology never does stay constant. It improves food production and distribution. Nitrogen fertilizer, a big improvement fostered by natural gas production, is only one example. GMO food is another. Anti-GMO activity is against science, but then The Science (TM) the government wants us to follow is different from real science. The agricultural revolution in crops has saved millions, even billions, of lives.
We’re getting close to the point where the “experts” are going to tell us to take actions that absolutely reduce living standards for the vast majority of people. Enforcing this will only be possible if government is by edict, no longer by the consent of the governed. The 2016 Trump victory and the Brexit vote were early indications that the peasants are revolting, not accepting the “experts” plans for a lower standard of living for the lower orders. The yellow vests in France are another early sign.
In the US, partial implementation of the Green New Deal is already unpopular. Biden and the Democrats are at record lows in the polls, because regulatory actions and spending have brought too few goods, and too much money, leading to explosive inflation. Attempts to make election cheating easier, so called voting rights bills, have failed. Angry voters will swamp the margin of fraud in 2022 and again in 2024.
So, are we going to eat bugs, just because “experts” tell us we have to so we can save the planet? Not blooming likely unless the “experts” impose a dicatorship to make us eat bugs.
The author is still seemingly convinced that the invisible hand of the market operates in a vacuum.
“Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people. ”
This is an interesting one, and I’ve been thinking about it for some time. Eventually society will cease to be composed predominantly of adults in possession of a drivers licence, and I suspect there will be some interesting and unwelcome side-effects because of this. Driving a car is one of the few activities that gives direct power and responsibility to adults as free agents. When we drive, we’re in charge of a very expensive piece of equipment that can double up as a lethal weapon. Make a mistake, behave irresponsibly, or act threateningly with it, and you can seriously hurt or kill someone including yourself, get into serious legal trouble, and do immense damage to your own personal finances.
And it is important to note that the behaviour that prevents all these things happening routinely isn’t just an ability to weigh up all the considerations at a remove, but that it is a learned instinct, an innate and reflexive set of behaviours that instils an implicit awareness of your surroundings, yourself and your actions.
I’ve made the point before that if cars were invented today, the existing big-government bureaucracy that presently parasitises most western societies would react with horror and disbelief to the notion that most adults would be permitted or able to control a speeding two ton metal box on a narrow road with other drivers piloting other similar machines in this opposite direction on the same road with no central barrier. It would be dismissed as laughable and would be declared illegal before the idea even took off.
Yet there is something in such an imagined reaction by the imaginary bureaucrats of this alternate history: for such a system of roads, cars and drivers to operate without a colossal daily accident toll, millions of people have to possess a highly specialised set of skills which are used responsibly on a daily basis. It is probably impossible to create such a thing all at once: it only exists now because it grew slowly over the decades, with new entrants to the pool being admitted slowly as they reach driving age, and the pool never containing more than a small proportion of novices at any one time.
The point of this is to speculate that as society gradually ceases to comprise millions of people in possession of the skills in question, it will also gradually lose the collective characteristics associated with the skills of driving: the instinctive ability to perceive and measure risk immediately, a reflexive allocation of respect to other participants in any given situation, and an automatic assumption of responsibility for one’s own actions and decisions. Or to put it another way, the skin-in-the-game stuff that Nassim Taleb wrote a book about. My own pet theory here is that the practice of driving by a majority of society’s adults has a civilising influence that we may only notice once it disappears.
If you’re prepared to eat shrimp, why would you turn up your nose at a dragonfly?
Ditto the question, if you eat cows, pigs and chickens, why not dogs, cats and eagles? Or even another human, who happened to accidentally die?
Each of such constraints are cultural, in the head, and are also not universal. And I say this as a lifelong vegetarian.
Eating your own species is dangerous as Kuru (a form of CJD), Mad Cow Disease (BSE) demonstrate. Eating dogs and cats is problematic in much of the West even if it were advisable. I think eating carnivores is less optimal because of parasite issues? Could be wrong. Even eating monogastric animals (chickens, pigs) is probably less optimal for human health…ruminants have a fatty acid balance less influencable by diet, thanks to those methane producing bacteria in their gut.
Your answer, which focuses on medical effects, kinda highlights the confusion around the issue. Imagine you could mitigate the specific downsides, say you keep away from the brain or gut products of the carnivore, or even human in question, (say, something off the shoulder perhaps), would that then mean it’s ok to consume bits of your pet dog or your cousin who died unfortunately? Philip Pullman made this argument in one of his books when a sentient bear consumed his dead human friend, almost as an act of respect. Personally speaking I’m not a Pullman fan, (the writing or the man) but I found this difficult to argue against at an intellectual level.
Philip Pullman is a hopeless writer. I would have been ok with just ignoring him but for his comically arrogant declaration that CS Lewis’s works were inferior to his own, which I personally think ought to have the fool in a straitjacket.
I had dog in Indonesia once. It tasted horrible. Herbivores taste nice….
Steamboat Puppy was an experience once in Singapore. What put me off to continue the practice was the price – not to mention the looks from some of the other “Round-Eyes”! present. Tasted a bit like chicken although I was assured that it was genuine canine.
Or are they moral/spiritual parameters? Pigs are so similar physically to humans that we are now transplanting their hearts !! What gives humans the right to place birds and animals in concentration camps and then kill them often in very painful ways – eg pigs being CO2 gassed. It seems that humans are corrupt and primitive creatures who find it acceptable to exploit absolutely EVERYTHING – and especially each other . As a species we are doomed until we recognize that we actually do not have the right to exploit ANYTHING without due respect (vs total arrogance). The outworkings of that karmic failure is war, famine, disease, massive inequality, fear and eventual demise into ?? manner of more primitive scenario that befits our primitive attitudes. Pretty straightforwards really – ARROGANCE VS RESPECT.
“why not dogs, cats and eagles? Or even another human, who happened to accidentally die?”
I suppose you vegetarians also think incest, murder, throwing puppies into wood-chippers is also inherently morally only a cultural choice.
Us ethical meat eaters see the difference. We tend to believe all is not just morally relative, not merely situational ethics, but there is a right and a wrong.
Absolutely. Especially throwing puppies into wood-chippers, we vegetarians think that’s just dandy. But you know, everyone needs a hobby, especially us vegetarians, and this is what we have picked, so there we have it.
Actually some vegetarians see the link between animal cruelty/human arrogance and Covid as a karmic happening that should make the Galetis of this world reflect on the issue – just as the climatic changes enhanced by human arrogance JUST MIGHT BE another aspect of ‘karma’. In fact some vegetarians might see present and future death rates and general human decline as a prerequisite for eventual human consciousness raising – ie as the alcoholism cure process – no real change until severe pain experienced……….Probably a lot more pain will happen cos we humans are verrry primitive !!
To be clear, I am a vegetarian because I was born into a vegetarian family. Were that not the case, I don’t doubt I would be wolfing down macburgers twice a day. I never got round to becoming a meat eater (although others in my family did), even after I had lost every argument for continuing to be a vegetarian given that I am not a vegetarian for religious reasons nor for ethical reasons. That’s just a personal temperament thing. Could I have become a vegetarian if I had been raised in a meat eating family? It’s possible, once I discovered about the horrors of industrialised meat production, but it would have happened late. I absolutely do not believe in the karmic stuff, although I still intermittently believe in schadenfreude.
I remember asking my A level biology class a similar question re Crustacea and Insecta. The response “Well miss you don’t get prawns flying around your bedroom in the dark!”
“Why we’ll end up eating bugs”…..I’m glad the “we” won’t be including me.
Mind you, if the bugs are ground up like soya protein and there is no off-putting taste who will notice if its added to food!?
I Prefer my soilent green to be pure – even if the taste is not changed, the idea of it having ground meal worms as an ingredient creeps me out.
Exactly. They’re already grinding up plants to make them look like burgers so there’s very little difference between that and ground up bugs with a little beetroot juice if all you do is look at the burger and decide it looks nice.
Replace the word bugs by “ground cultivated proteins” and no one will ever know the difference!
Whether it’s a good idea or isn’t a good idea is a different argument
What’s with all these insects? Very few yachts have a fridge, let alone a freezer. When I go sailing I take “Quorn” pots and sachets plus TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) in Kg bags. You can have whatever flavour you like (as part of the pre-treatment) and I take 3 types of shapes/textures. It also go down well with two ladies I sometimes meet up with in foreign parts (Bristol, again). PS – I’m not a Veggy but I am “under the doctor” He says that I’ve got pre-pre-diabetes so we agreed that I should substitute 50% of my meat with something more suitable to my needs. That leaves me with plenty of space for giant Bacon Sarnies but those same two ladies take a dim view of that practice. I can’t win!
In Switzerland, home of Davos, you can already find dried insects on the shelves in supermarkets – choose from crickets and mealworms by the bag, or in pre-prepared dishes. https://shop.migros.ch/en/direct/product/5751982
Mind you the cost of meat is so expensive – 35CHF (£28) a kilo for chicken breast – the price forces people to look for cheaper alternatives.
My local ASDA in South Wales says between an eighth and a quarter of that price. Staycation is good but I suppose I could go foreign – I can see Bristol airport (England!) from my bedroom window.
There is only a space problem if you live in a big city. According to NOAA, 8.8% of coastal area and 4.09% of inland area in the US is developed. Availability of cropland is not, and will never be, a problem.
What golden age of capitalism? We do not live under capitalism anymore, we live under managerialism. Capitalists — those whose claim on profit derive from the fact that it is their resources that are at risk in the market — are, by and large, not in control of anything, other than privately held corporations, since they hold shares indirectly though index funds, mutual funds, or in pension funds, or don’t hold enough to actually control the company they have direct holdings in. The professional managers at BlackRock, Vanguard, Berkshire Hathaway, and State Street vote more than 80% of the governing shares in US corporations… and then there are those voted by professional managers at other corporations and lesser investment houses.
Capitalism has been too successful. Too many people are being born, procreating avd living longer. 3 to 7 billion population growth in 50 years, and uplifting many of them to 1st world lifestyle levels is unsustainable. As Malthus postulated, after some point this can only lead to a crash.
Malthusians are always wrong. Particularly now with populations collapsing in the west and Asia.
Idiot!
I think your comment needs some elucidatio;, are you just insulting the writer, or is there some particular aspect of the essay with which you disagree? If the former then this is not a particularly constructive comment.
It’s just Tourettes.
I agree with Lee – both the Writer for not noting these Davos guys are pure evil, and the Davos guys for being evil.
I disagre.