The World Economic Forum's Vision for Global Economic Growth

In this recent publication:

 

 

...the self-annointed/self-appointed ruling class at the World Economic Forum looks at the future of the public-private economic model (i.e. stakeholder capitalism) particularly as it relates to the Fourth Industrial Revolution that it has promoted for our collective futures.  The publication begins by noting this:

 

"Against the backdrop of an increasingly contested geoeconomic world order, governments in many countries are restructuring industrial policies to serve well-defined strategic purposes.1 This is in line with historical precedent, as times of crisis or uncertainty tend to see governments take the lead in prioritizing specific problems and marshalling the actors and resources required to solve them.

 

In parallel, businesses are becoming more purpose- driven in their approach to markets, driven by investor movements prioritizing environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as well as by public pressure.

 

This twin trend has the potential to underpin a new era of public-private convergence on addressing the most important problems facing humanity, with governments taking more initiative on market co- creation and businesses taking more responsibility for orienting their products and services towards social and environmental outcomes."

  

The WEF firmly believes that this plan which will create the "markets of tomorrow" will solve all of the most important national, regional and global problems that plague the world today.  One might almost be under the impression that the ruling class really cares about the organ donor class and its difficulties.

 

The data for this report was gleaned from the WEF's global Executive Opinion Survey and sheds light on these three questions:

 

1.) Which technologies have the highest strategic importance around the world? 

 

2.) Which sectors enable the growth of new markets? 

 

3.) What are the bottlenecks obstructing the growth of new markets to act on these strategic priorities?

 

I would bet that my readers don't sleep at night worrying about these issues....that along with how you are going to pay for food, rent, fuel, your mortgage and car payments but that's why we're the serf class and they are the ruling class.

 

Let's move along and look at the answers to the three questions cited above:

 

1.) Which technologies have the highest strategic importance around the world? 

 

Let's start by looking at the "markets of tomorrow' through the lens of technological priorities.  Of course, being the child of technocrat Klaus Schwab who never heard about any technology that he didn't warmly embrace, the report focuses on technology as it relates to the economic foundations of the global economy.Business leaders were asked for their three top choices to answer "Which technologies are of strategic importance to your country in the next 10 years?".  Here is an overview of the responses from global executives:

 

 

What we need to remember is that technology, particularly intelligence agents and robots, are predicted to displace as much as 14 percent (or more) of the world's current human labor according to a study by McKinsey.  We need to remember that technology is not always our friend but it certainly is a close friend to the investor/executive class.

Agricultural technologies topped the list of strategic priorities in 44 of the 120 nations in the study, many of which are located in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa where economies are increasingly reliant on agricultural imports, not to mention the ever-present bogeyman of global climate change on crop yields.  This must thrill billionaires like Farmer Bill Gates who is clearly of the "technology can solve the global food problem" ilk and "I have the money to invest in your agricultural technology as long as I stand to benefit personally.".

  

Here is a map showing the highest strategic importance of various technologies in each economy:

 

 

2.) Which sectors will enable the growth of new markets?

 

Here is a graphic showing the top ten sectors of the economy are most likely to experience new market creation in the opinion of the global executive class:

 

 

Here is a map showing the top sectors of the economy that are most likely to experience new market creation for each of the 120 nations in the WEF executive survey:

 

 

Again, you'll notice a significant geographic divide with Latin American and African leaders anticipating the most growth in primary sectors like agriculture, forestry and fishing and the more advanced economies anticipating growth in energy technology, information technology and other technology services.

  

3.) What are the bottlenecks obstructing the growth of new markets to act on these strategic priorities?

 

Let's close by looking at the top ten obstacles/bottlenecks to the growth of new markets in the eyes of the global executive class:

 

 

Lower- and middle-income economies rank infrastructure and finance as the biggest obstacles to expanding markets whereas high-income economies rank a lack of skills and talent and a lack of public sector initiative as the biggest obstacles.  This is rather ironic given that it is these same advanced economies that are seeing employment in their manufacturing sectors gutted as the sectors increasingly automate.  Apparently, all of the talk about retraining redundant low-skilled workers and turning them into highly-skilled tech sector workers is just that....talk.

  

Under the World Economic Forum's vision for the world, the private (and I might add unelected) sector will become increasingly important to the control of the global economy.  We can see that in the conclusion of the report as quoted here with my bolds:

 

"The findings from leading executives around the world can be interpreted as a strong signal from the private sector that a dynamic public sector would be welcome as a means of unlocking untapped potential for market creation. The evidence of new approaches to industrial and investment policy around the world suggest that this kind of public-sector dynamism may be on an upswing. This may augur well for the markets of tomorrow, which will ultimately rest on a shift towards identifying and solving the key strategic challenges in different national contexts and building dialogue and symbiotic partnerships between public and private sectors, fuelled by the need to solve the most pressing problems."

 

In other words, give us the tax dollars that you have collected from your organ donor class citizens and get out of the way so that the executive class can maximize its control over the global economy by ever-expanding the markets of tomorrow which, if the Great COVID-19 Recession was a harbinger of things to come, means even greater wealth for a select few billionaires while the rest of us wile away our remaining days, unemployed, subsisting on a universal basic income and living in "our" non-owned "homes" using goods that we have rented from the "landlord class".