Imagine a spine-chilling scenario: the deadline for handing in your work is mercilessly approaching so that you can nearly feel it breathing down your neck. As you try to exploit each brain cell available while frantically hitting the keyboard in the throes of strenuous work… your laptop suddenly decides to freeze! The chances are that you will immediately perform the most prevalent remedy for most of the technological hardships – turning the device off and on again, eventually resetting it back to its initial state. Great.
But what should you do when, instead of the laptop, your economy freezes due to a global pandemic?
Apparently, you might want to do exactly the same trick.
You may want to ask, how?
COVID-19 has radically transformed our world as we know it– brand new challenges have arisen, the familiar ones got even more severe, and the most significant fragilities of humanity became irreversibly exposed. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that global leaders have been persistently puzzling over our next move since the elected path of recovery will redefine our world for the years to come. Amid their discussions and brainstorming sessions, they came up with an idea enigmatically named The Great Reset.
What exactly does it mean?
The Great Reset is an initiative displaying a wide range of economic policies and general suggestions created to use post-pandemic recovery as a tool to actively construct a better, more sustainable, and equitable world for the generations to come.
This term was initially unveiled as the name of the 50th annual World Economic Forum meeting held in June 2020 in Davos, Switzerland, and will be the central theme during the WEF's 2021 summit planned to happen in May in Lucerne too.
The Great Reset's main initiators have expressed an urgent need to battle the inconsistencies and inadequacies of several systems, including intervening in healthcare, finance, education, and energy. Many conversations have also mentioned the significance of building a new social contract that would respect the dignity of each and every human being.
The Great Reset's main gist can be expressed by the extended version of its name – The Great Reset of Capitalism. Klaus Schwab has thoroughly described his vision of instigating stakeholder capitalism. This conception underscores the need of a company to focus on meeting the needs of all of their stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, other business partners, local communities, and society in general.
One of the most famous opponents of this genre of capitalism was Milton Friedman, arguing that the primary responsibility of a business is to increase its value for the shareholders.
Let's take a deeper delve into the assumptions and postulates of the Great Reset
The Great Reset's agenda touches on many vital issues that the world is facing with three core components at its forefront: creating mentioned 'stakeholder economy'; focusing on the worsening climate change that increases the importance of green public infrastructure projects; and "harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the public good" through sophisticated international cooperation promoted by Davos.
Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund director, has mentioned three main aspects of the proper post-pandemic response: "green growth, smarter growth, and fairer growth." Meanwhile, Prince Charles has listed the areas of necessary action: "the re-invigoration of science, technology, and innovation, a move towards net zero transitions globally, the introduction of carbon pricing, re-inventing longstanding incentive structures, rebalancing investments to include more green investments, and encouraging green public infrastructure projects."
Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, has described the primary purpose of the Great Reset in one of his articles: "Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed." He has also expressed the need to revamp all aspects of societies and economies "from education to social contracts and working conditions."
This initiative has quickly received a lot of support from well-known politicians, entrepreneurs as well as celebrities, some of whom have participated in Klaus Schwab's event like Prince Charles, Gina Gopinath, António Guterres, Al Gore, and representatives of major global corporations. Speakers have even described the pandemic as the 'golden opportunity' to enact significant changes to transform today's socio-economic reality.
But why are people so worried about it?
As you further explore the WEF's materials on this initiative, the Great Reset is described as a judicious and responsible vision of development accompanied by sustainability, equality, and trust. If this combination does not sound like the most coveted version of the economic future, then I do not know what does. Nonetheless, only seventy-two hours after its announcement, the petition to stop The Great Reset has gained over 80 000 signatures.
Alright then, so why does the Great Reset remain such a controversial topic? What makes this nearly utopian vision of a post-pandemic recovery a subject under a flaming fire of criticism and the breeding ground for zealous conspiracy theories?
One of the Forbes articles has depicted The Great Reset's agenda as "another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful." It is also important to highlight that the World Economic Forum is a non-government organization. It is influential, however, not as influential as the World Bank, or the United Nations, or the International Monetary Fund. That makes this topic much more of a set of theoretical considerations than strict policy rules that will take over the world.
Naomi Klein has called Schwab's visions a "Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie" and the "coronavirus-themed rebranding" of actions already undertaken by the World Economic Forum. She has pointed out that most of these objectives have appeared on the board of topics discussed by the World Economic Forum since 2003, while James Delingpole has called this initiative a "global communist takeover plan."
There are also critics highlighting the issue of stakeholder capitalism being too vague, as Ben Sixsmith has pointed out: "Facebook, IBM, Lockheed Martin et cetera are free to interpret it quite as they wish."
One of the best summaries of doubts related to The Great Reset has been offered by C Raja Mohan, contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express: "The right sees the WEF arguments about restructuring the global economy as a dangerous attempt to impose 'socialism' and dismantle the traditional society, or what remains of it. The left scoffs at the Davos Man's talk on the crisis of capitalism. It points to the complicity of the Davos forum in promoting policies that have brought the world to the current impasse and question its capacity to produce solutions."
Our role in resetting the economy
It is significantly easier to speak about specific changes and ideals than to, in fact, embody them.
Yes, the world needs to focus on the pressing issues of the pandemic, inequality, and climate change; however, meticulously constructed plans aiming to solve or minimize these problems cannot be executed solely by the global leaders' speeches. Their words of determination sound truly beautiful, yet, without constant efforts and active interventions making our economy more equitable and sustainable, they remain letters glued together into magnificent words.
In fact, everything comes down to individual decisions made by billions of people each and every day. It might make you feel a little helpless, but I have some excellent news for you – within those billions, there are people like you and me, our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. Therefore, once we devote ourselves to the purposeful promotion of the qualities like sustainability, equality, and trust through everyday actions, we will already take the first step in making the world a better place.
Let's take Winston Churchill's words to our hearts and "never let a 'good' crisis go to waste," not even this time.
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