8522 H3 Davos Man

Mr. Goodman is a veteran journalist who has covered economics for several papers and from postings around the globe. “Davos Man” is well-written and well-reported and dedicated to exposing the falsity of what he calls the “Cosmic Lie” — the notion that what helps the rich become richer benefits everyone. To discredit it, Mr. Goodman juxtaposes the view from the luxury stomping grounds of the billionaire class with vignettes from working-class neighborhoods — pairing a yacht-riding titan of fast fashion with a jobless textile worker, the spacefaring Jeff Bezos with an overworked Amazon package-picker.

He focuses on a handful of representative billionaires such as Mr. Bezos and Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, a private-equity firm, towards whom the author appears to harbor a particular animus. He serves up juicy quotes capturing Mr. Schwarzman’s unrepentant glee at the financial opportunities created by the pandemic (“There’s always a way of making money in these types of volatile situations”). The author also documents the way some private-equity firms piled into the health-care sector and slashed hospital capacity—in the years before the advent of covid-19.

The text vibrates with anger. The sense of outrage that radiates from the page is initially off-putting but becomes ever easier to share over the course of the book. It is stoked not only, or even primarily, by the ways the plutocrats build their fortunes. Mr. Goodman’s disgust is spurred more by gymnastic feats of tax avoidance, the occasionally staggering lack of empathy and self-awareness, and the towering injustice of extreme wealth alongside terrible adversity. Thus, the spleen vented at the WEF, which in Mr. Goodman’s description functions like billionaire therapy: a place where the very rich go to reassure themselves that they are the solution to social ills rather than the problem.

But the book is not altogether persuasive. Its arguments are weakened by a determination to pin most of the world’s ills on the mega-rich. Private-equity barons may be responsible for turfing longtime tenants out of properties in order to flip them and turn a profit, but not for the high cost of housing generally, which has far more to do with middle-class homeowners’ success in limiting dense development. Neither is immense wealth necessarily a product of tax-dodging and rent-seeking. Mr. Bezos, for example, would not be a billionaire if millions of consumers were not so keen to shop with Amazon.

Indeed, “Davos Man” itself shows that there is plenty of blame to go around. Mr. Goodman documents how xenophobia and racism flourish in places left behind by economic change, and how the charges often levelled at refugees and immigrants—that they are troublesome freeloaders—are baseless. But he sees nativism as another black mark against billionaires, rather than an ethical failure by people who may have suffered but have not lost their capacity for moral reasoning. Similarly, he quotes a cab driver from Sunderland, in northern England, who admits of Brexit: “No one here really understood [it]…We just knew that people in London had been fucking us for as long as we could remember… It was our chance to fuck them back.”

The reckless use of individuals’ civic rights, as much as the sins of the billionaires, has landed some countries in dire straits. Mr. Goodman ends by arguing that a better world is possible through the “thoughtful use” of democracy. It is, but only if voters are more interested in taking responsibility for improving their lot than in searching for scapegoats. 

古德曼（Goodman）先生是一位资深记者，曾到访全球多家报社驻点并报道经济相关的内容。他所著的《达沃斯论坛的五位巨富》一书文笔优美，报道详实。该书致力于揭露作者所称的巨大谎言，即让富人愈富的做法会使所有人受益。为了揭穿这一谎言，古德曼先生将亿万富豪阶级的奢华生活与工薪阶层的日常相提并论：乘坐游艇的快时尚巨头与失业的纺织工人，遨游太空的杰夫·贝索斯与过度劳累的亚马逊包装工。

本书的重点放在了少数具有代表性的亿万富翁身上，如贝索斯和私募基金公司黑石集团的联合创始人兼首席执行官苏世民，作者似乎对他们怀有某种敌意。他在书中记录了苏世民于新冠疫情期间在金融上投机的喜悦，内容包含大量精彩的语录，例如：苏世民曾说“在动荡的局势下，总有赚钱的办法。”作者还记录了在新冠肆虐前几年里，一些私募基金涌入医疗保健行业并削减医院收治能力.

这本书字里行间充满了愤怒。这种愤怒起初令人不快，但随着阅读的深入，越来越能够引发读者的共鸣。财阀们如何创造财富是愤怒的主要来源之一。古德曼的反感更多的是源于这些巨富们高超的避税技巧、时而迟钝的冷漠和自私，以及面临危机时极端财富所体现出的极大不公。 古德曼把世界经济论坛形容为亿万富翁的一场心理治疗：富人们在这里自我安慰。仿佛他们是社会弊病的解决方案，而不是问题所在。

这本书只在一定程度上具有说服力。“一味地将世界上发生的大多数问题归咎于巨富”的说法削弱了该书的说服力。私募股权大亨们为了获利将长期租户赶走，他们或许应为此事负责，而非为普遍的高房价负责。高房价和中产阶级房主成功限制了高密度住房开发更有关联性。巨额财富也不一定是逃税和寻租的产物。例如，如果没有数百万消费者热衷于在亚马逊网站购物，贝索斯就不会成为亿万富翁。

诚然，《达沃斯论坛的五位巨富》指出了许多人都有责任。古德曼记录了仇外心理和种族主义是如何在经济落后的地方蓬勃发展的。他也说明了人们指控难民和移民白吃白喝制造麻烦毫无根据。但古德曼认为排外主义是亿万富翁的另一个污点，而不是那些虽然可能遭受损失但并未丧失道德底线的人的污点。同样地，他引用了来自英格兰北部桑德兰的一位出租车司机的话。这位司机支持英国脱欧，他说：“这里没有人真正理解英国脱欧这件事......我们只知道，从我们记事起，伦敦人就一直在搞我们......这是我们反击的机会。” 

不计后果地使用个人的公民权利和亿万富翁的罪恶都一样，使一些国家陷入水深火热之中。古德曼最后提到，通过“深思熟虑地利用”民主，我们可以拥有一个更美好的世界。的确如此，但前提是选民必须更愿意为改善自身命运而承担责任，不是甩锅寻找替罪羊。