The Economist January 29th 2022 Culture 73Downwiththemega-richThe wealth of
nations
I
n january 2021 MarcBenioff,thebillion
aire founder of Salesforce, a software
firm, delivered his verdict on the pandem
ic’s first year. “We have to say it,” he
declared to those observing the virtual pro
ceedings of the World Economic Forum
(wef), an annual gathering of the elite in
Davos, Switzerland: “ceos are definitely
the heroes of 2020.”
The grandest of them were certainly
among its winners. In that year, as millions
of people died of covid19 and many more
faced severe hardship, the collective
wealth of the world’s billionaires rose by
$3.9trn, reports Peter Goodman, global
economics correspondent for the New York
Times, in his new book. The incongruity of
the fortunes of the rich soaring amid mass
suffering is no accident, he reckons.
Despite fervent claims to the contrary by
the megarich, Mr Goodman says, their
pursuit of wealth has undermined soci
ety’s capacity to deal with crises and left
the world in its present troubled state.
Mr Goodman is a veteran journalist
who has covered economics for several pa
pers and from postings around the globe.
“Davos Man” is wellwritten 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 workingclass
neighbourhoods—pairing a yachtriding
titan of fast fashion with a jobless textile
worker, the spacefaring Jeff Bezos with an
overworked Amazon packagepicker.
He focuses on a handful of representa
tive billionaires such as Mr Bezos and
Stephen Schwarzman, the cofounder and
ceoof Blackstone, a privateequity firm,
towards whom the author appears to har
bour a particular animus. He serves up
juicy quotes capturing Mr Schwarzman’s
unrepentant glee at the financial opportu
nities created by the pandemic (“There’s al
ways a way of making money in these types
of volatile situations”). The author also
documents the way some privateequity
firms piled into the healthcare sector—
and slashed hospital capacity—in the years
before the advent of covid19.
The text vibrates with anger. The senseof outrage that radiates from the page is
initially offputting, but becomes ever eas
ier 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 occa
sionally staggering lack of empathy and
selfawareness, and the towering injustice
of extreme wealth alongside terrible adver
sity. Thus the spleen vented at the wef,
which in Mr Goodman’s description func
tions 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 persua
sive. Its arguments are weakened by a de
termination to pin most of the world’s ills
on the megarich. Privateequity 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 middleclass homeown
ers’ success in limiting dense develop
ment. Neither is immense wealth neces
sarily a product of taxdodging and rent
seeking. Mr Bezos, for example, would notbe 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 of
ten 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 ca
pacity 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 remem
ber...It was our chance to fuck them back.”
The reckless use of individuals’ civic
rights, as much as the sins of the billion
aires, 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 interestedin taking
responsibility for improvingtheir lot than
in searching for scapegoats.nDavos Man: How the Billionaires
Devoured the World.By Peter Goodman.
Custom House; 480 pages; $29.99 and £20MusicalposterityHe on wings could rise
H
ow long can it take for a flop to
become a smash? In the case of one of
George Frideric Handel’s oratorios, the an
swer is around 250 years. In February 1750
the composer turned 65. A few weeks later
the London audience which, for almost
four decades, he had regaled with operas in
Italian and sacred choral works in English,snubbed his latest offering. For the open
ing night of “Theodora”, the theatre at
Covent Garden was halfempty.
Luck was against him: a pair of minor
earthquakes had kept musiclovers at
home. But “Theodora” was anyway a tough
sell—a stately, sombre drama about a virtu
ous Christian heroine, martyred for her
faith under a despotic Roman governor.
“Never mind,” the Germanborn maestro
reportedly quipped of the disappointing
house; “the music will sound better.”
By May of the same year, Handel had
bounced back. Charity performances of his
earlier oratorio, “Messiah”, established it
as the hallfilling favourite it remains. Yet
he had packed the longneglected “Theo
dora” with ravishing music at least the
equal of its more famous forerunner. The
composer rated “He saw the lovely youth”,
sung by a chorus of persecuted Christians,
above “Hallelujah” in “Messiah”. The fear
less and principled women—the heroine
and her friend Irene—stand melodiously
firm against the worst horrors of tyranny.
Handel scattered the work with seemingly
simple yet transcendently graceful arias,A masterpiece that flopped in 1750 at last returns to Covent GardenGorgeous George