blue. Nature in all her glory. The perfect backdrop to the annual congregation of privilege and power. The premiers and the billionaires. The limousines and the helicopters. The 50th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was about to begin.
‘It’s a jamboree,’ my host confided as he picked me up from the small train station late the night before and showed me to my temporary accommodation. A borrowed apartment set back from the town, overlooking the mountains. ‘It’s a jungle,’ replied his companion. And we all managed to laugh.
Our leaders know the rules of this game. They understand intuitively that this ostentatious pageant is a beauty parade. The stakes are always high. The spotlights must gleam on sharp suits and slick haircuts. The cavalcades must jostle for superiority. The rhetoric must be finely tuned to the peculiar struggles of the day. The sun must shine dutifully on the righteous. The charade must leave no room for doubt. The mountains must forever seal the bargain struck in the basements of history: more begets more; power begets power; growth begets growth. To them that hath, it shall be given.
They have been jetting into this dazzling resort for five decades now, pledging allegiance to the great god Growth. Come snow or shine, foul weather or fine, their task has always been crystal clear: to bring succour to the weak, courage to the faint of heart. To slay the dragons of doubt, wherever they may arise. Economic growth is just a confidence trick. As long as we believe it, it will happen. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.4
There are invariably plenty of dragons. This year was no different. Europe was worried about the rise of populism. Australia was anxious about the fires still raging through its long ‘black summer’. The US was worried about the trade war with China. Almost everyone was suddenly worried about the carbon. Climate change was the surprise beneficiary of this year’s struggle for attention. The school strikes of 2019 had finally pushed the matter to the very top of the Forum’s list of long-term risks to growth.
That was a first. Against the odds, a broad – though not quite unanimous – consensus emerged from Davos that something would have to be done before the floods and the bushfires – or the annoying activists who occasionally blocked the flow of limousines into and out of the town – derailed the economic bandwagon.
‘The impatience of our young people is something we should tap,’ Angela Merkel told the conference. She was referring of course to the extraordinary leadership shown by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was there in town for a second time, speaking truth to power with the extraordinary clarity of a seer. A dove amongst the pigeons. This year, the simplicity of her message had drawn a whole new generation of activists into a battlefield they could barely recognize. They looked around them in defiance and awe. The German Chancellor was not the only old-timer to find a tear of sympathy welling in her eye.5
Not everyone was impressed. ‘Is she the chief economist or who is she? I’m confused,’ joked the US Treasury Secretary, Stephen Mnuchin, in a moment he must surely have regretted almost instantly. ‘After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us.’ When you’re in a hole, Stephen. Stop digging.6
But they couldn’t, of course. Stop digging. Then US President Donald Trump was determined to place this nonsense in the wider context of an undying creed. ‘To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,’ he proclaimed. ‘They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.’ Our hero gazes out across the savannah of upturned faces towards the horizon of endless opportunity. I imagine a self-satisfied speechwriter somewhere, smiling smugly. Life is just a Hollywood B-movie.7
Paradise is a land forged from a frontier mentality. Burn it down, dig it up, build over it. Progress is a construction site. It may look messy for now, but tomorrow’s shopping malls and condominiums will be a glorious sight. Let those who doubt this vision perish. The school kids, the climate strikers, the extinction rebels: they can all go to hell. The heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers be damned. Compulsory optimism is the flavour of the day. And the blindingly obvious is expunged from the discourse of power.
The snow above Davos grows thinner each year. The Alpine ski season is a month shorter than it was when Klaus Schwab first founded the Forum in 1971. The climate is changing. The ice is melting. A million species are facing extinction. We are shifting ecological balances in totally unpredictable ways. Sometimes in ways that have turned out to be deadly. The finite planet we call home is being altered, perhaps irreversibly, by the massive expansion in human activity that parades under the seductive banner of progress. But please don’t bring these realities to our attention. We have worked so hard not even to acknowledge them.8
In another telling moment from the same Davos stage, Austria’s newly elected Chancellor had used his time at the podium to call for Europe to become more innovative, more forward-looking, more dynamic. At 33 years old, Sebastian Kurz had just become the youngest head of state in the world for the second time in the space of as many years. He chastised the ‘pessimism’ of the older European economy and praised the dynamism of younger, ‘hungrier’ ones. Echoing the frontier rhetoric, he called for renewed optimism, more innovation, faster growth. Nothing new there.
But later in the discussion, Kurz acknowledged something curious. ‘I had a recent discussion about various philosophies: a postgrowth society,’ he told his audience. ‘We were being told perhaps it could be good for a country not to grow, that it would be better to measure happiness rather than economic growth.’ The delivery was engaging. A faint smile played across the young man’s lips. For a moment, you were tempted to believe that a more sensible generation of politicians had arrived at last. That things would be different now. ‘It all sounds wonderful and romantic,’ he said. His eyes twinkled knowingly. ‘But happiness doesn’t pay pensions!’9
Kurz had introduced the postgrowth society only to dismiss it again immediately as a fluffy utopian notion, with no grounding in reality. But within weeks that easy denial seemed like yesterday’s wisdom. The end of the warmest January on record held a harsh lesson in store. Few were aware of it even in privileged Davos. Some over-anxious minds may have harboured sneaking suspicions. A few unscrupulous politicians had already employed insider knowledge to shift their personal wealth away from the danger of financial collapse. But most were either ignorant or in denial. No one could quite have predicted the extent of the profound economic and social shock that was about to launch itself on an unsuspecting world. Even as Trump delivered his frontier eulogy, a young Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, was fighting for his life in Wuhan Central Hospital.10
Less than a month before, Li had alerted the world to a new, unfamiliar and surprisingly virulent strain of coronavirus that had broken out in an area of the city occupied by an animal market. He had been roundly reprimanded for his pains. Two weeks later he would be dead: a heroic statistic on the alarmingly exponential curve of an escalating pandemic. Li would be the first of many, unnecessary and utterly preventable deaths, as frontline workers lost their lives caring for others.11
Within weeks, the global economy would be plunged into an existential crisis. Denial would turn to confusion. Confusion would turn to expediency. Expediency would overturn everything. Normalcy would evaporate more or less overnight. Businesses, homes, communities, whole countries went into lockdown. Even the preoccupation with growth would diminish momentarily in the urgency to protect people’s lives. Alongside an uncomfortable reminder of what matters most in life, we were being given a history lesson in what economics looks like when growth disappears completely. And one thing became clear very rapidly: it looks nothing like anything the modern world has seen before.
Eventually we will find a better terminology to describe our world. Language sometimes situates itself a little too close to the object of its scrutiny. Happiness may or may not be the currency of tomorrow’s pensions.
