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I Read Klaus Schwab’s “The Great Reset” So You Don’t Have To
Spoilers: you will have nothing and you will be happy.
Klaus Schwab is a German economist and engineer. He founded the World Economic Forum, the conference where the worldwide elite meets up each year in Davos, the luxury Swiss ski station, to talk about poverty and the struggle of the working class.
Schwab is also the author of “The Great Reset” which came out in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.
The book is supposed to give you a glimpse of what the future of human civilization is.
I read the book, curious to see what Schwab got right and wrong, and how an ideal society looked like according to him.
Here are the three major trends of the book.
1. More Surveillance
Today’s world has three characteristics: it is interdependent, it is fast, and it is complex.
So complex in fact that it is beyond our understanding, hence our difficulty to anticipate what Nassim Taleb calls “Black Swan events”.
This interdependent complexity has made society bigger than the sum of its parts. We are no longer questioning if one event in a part of the world will have consequences on other parts — but how strong will the impact be.
A few examples of this are the 2008 crisis, the 2011 Japan tsunami, or the blockade of the Panama canal. Covid is only an event from the same series.
This interconnectivity is not making society stronger or more resilient, but weaker. Impacts are not isolated when catastrophes hit, but ripple and harm other parts of the world that at first view played no parts in the original event.
As interconnectivity increases, we can expect more of these Black Swan events, and more rippling in the world.
“Fortunately”, these could be avoided with more surveillance, according to Klaus Schwab.
More biological surveillance to avoid the spreading of new viruses.
More surveillance of people for their own protection.
More surveillance of the world so that we can better anticipate “Black Swan” events.
