“I can’t wait to see how the incoming administration deals with AI (artificial intelligence),” said US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a less-than-gracious reference to the fact that the Trump team hasn’t got a clue about the real driving force in the changing world economy.
What was striking was that Kerry didn’t have to clarify his remark for the 2,000 “global leaders” – politicians, bureaucrats, business representatives and public intellectuals – who are in the Swiss alpine town of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF). They all know what he’s talking about.
This year’s Davos gathering is actually focused on the rise of populism and simple-minded attacks on globalisation (Donald Trump, Brexit et al.). That’s only to be expected, since the world’s ultra-rich are potentially threatened by that sort of thing. But they didn’t get rich by being stupid, and they have a fairly sophisticated analysis of what’s causing it.
The headline event on the first day of Davos was an hour-long speech by China’s President Xi Jinping in which he laid claim to the leadership role on free trade, globalisation and the struggle to contain climate change that is being abandoned by the United States under Trump. His main concern was to fight the rise of protectionism: “No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” he said.
But Xi didn’t go into the sources of the anger that fuels the populist revolt (for China is not a democratic country, and it hasn’t happened there yet). John Kerry did get into it, and he went well beyond the usual platitudes about rising unemployment and under-employment, stagnating wages, and the widening gulf between the rich and the rest. “Trade is not to blame for job losses,” he said. Automation is.
Quite a few American manufacturing jobs did go abroad in the early stages of globalisation, in the 1980s and 1990s, but that’s old news. Eighty-five percent of the almost 6 million American manufacturing jobs that disappeared between 2000 and 2010 did not go anywhere; they just evaporated.
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