Great Reset
The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020, accompanied by a video message from the then-Prince of Wales, Charles. Its stated objective is to support recovery from the global pandemic in a manner that emphasises sustainable development.
At the time of the initiative's announcement, WEF chairman Klaus Schwab outlined three core components of the initiative: advancing a "stakeholder economy"; building in a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way using environmental, social, and governance metrics; and "harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution." In a keynote address, International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva identified three principles of a sustainable recovery: green growth, smarter growth, and fairer growth.
"The Great Reset" was chosen as the theme of the 2021 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The summit was postponed several times due to the pandemic, first to May 2021 and later to 2022. The theme of Davos 2022 was "History at a Turning Point", with discussions largely dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Great Reset Initiative, and the WEF more broadly, have been criticised by commentators for encouraging economic deregulation and expanding the influence of private corporations, particularly multinational corporations, in policymaking at the expense of governmental authority. Others argued that it overemphasised health and exaggerated the ability of a small group of decision-makers to reshape the global economy, or that it amounted to crony capitalism.
The initiative also became the focus of conspiracy theories circulated mainly by conservative commentators on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Conspiratorial claims included that the pandemic had been engineered by a secret group to control the global economy, that lockdowns were intentionally designed to cause economic collapse, or that a global elite sought to abolish private property while using vaccines to subjugate populations. Such theories gained traction when political leaders including U.S. president Joe Biden, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau referred to the idea of a post-pandemic "reset" in public statements.
Key components
By mid-April 2020, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the COVID-19 recession, the 2020 Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war, and the resulting "collapse in oil prices", the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, described possible fundamental changes in an article in The Economist. Carney said that in a post-COVID world, "stakeholder capitalism" will be tested as "companies will be judged by 'what they did during the war', how they treated their employees, suppliers and customers, by who shared and who hoarded." The "gulf between what markets value and what people value" will close. "In a post-COVID world, it is reasonable to expect that more people will want improvements in risk management, in social and medical safety nets, and will want more attention paid to scientific experts. This new hierarchy of values will call for a reset on the way we deal with climate change, which, like the pandemic, is a global phenomenon. No one can 'self-isolate' from climate change, so we all need to 'act in advance and in solidarity." In his 2020 BBC Reith Lectures, Carney developed his theme of value hierarchies as related to three crises—credit, COVID, and climate.According to a 15 May 2020 WEF article, COVID-19 offered an opportunity to "reset and reshape" the world in a way that is more aligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, as climate change, inequality, and poverty gained even greater urgency during the pandemic. This included resetting labour markets, as more people work remotely speeding up the process of the "future of work". The reset would advance work already begun to prepare for the transition to the Fourth Industrial Revolution by upskilling and reskilling workers. Another post-COVID concern raised by the WEF is food security including the "risk of disruptions to food supply chains", and the need for "global policy coordination" to prevent "food protectionism from becoming the post-pandemic new normal".
In her 3 June 2020 keynote address opening the Great Reset forum, a joint initiative of the WEC and then Prince of Wales Charles, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund said that there has been a "massive injection of fiscal stimulus to help countries deal with this crisis" and that it was of "paramount importance that this growth should lead to a greener, smarter, fairer world in the future". Georgieva listed three aspects of the Great Reset: green growth, smarter growth, and fairer growth. Government investments and government incentives for private investors could "support low-carbon and climate-resilient growth" such as "planting mangroves, land restoration, reforestation or insulating buildings". With low oil prices, the timing was right to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and introduce carbon pricing to incentivise future investments. The COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to shape an economic recovery and the future direction of global relations, economies and priorities.
In June 2020, Klaus Schwab, who founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 was chairman at the time, described the three core components of the Great Reset. The first includes creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; improving policies and agreements on taxes, regulations, fiscal policies and trade to result in "fairer outcomes". The second component addresses how the large-scale pandemic spending programs with private investments and pension funds could improve on the old system by building one that is more "resilient, equitable and sustainable" over the long term by "building green urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social and governance metrics". The third component of a Great Reset agenda is to "harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution" for the public good. A July 2020 non-fiction by Schwab and economist Thierry Malleret develops the plan in more detail.
In one of the Great Reset Dialogues, John Kerry and other members of a WEF dialogue discussed how to rebuild the "social contract" in a post-COVID world.
In a comment according to Charles III, the economic recovery must put the world on a path to sustainability, which would include carbon pricing. He emphasized that the private sector would be the main drivers of the plan. The market should adapt to the current reality by aiming for fairer results, ensuring that investments are aimed at mutual progress including accelerating ecologically friendly investments, and to start a fourth industrial revolution, creating digital economic and public infrastructure.
According to Schwab, they would not change the economic system, but rather improve it to what he considers to be "responsible capitalism". The Brookings Institution described this three-point plan in response to the COVID-19 crisis; response, recovery and reset. For the near term it involves response. In the medium term this involves "rebuilding economic and social activity in a manner that protects public health, promotes societal healing and preserves the environment". The reset is for systems over the long term of establishing through our "collective imagination" a great reset; a "new equilibrium among political, economic, social and environmental systems toward common goals".
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Klaus Schwab used the concept of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution" in a 2015 article published by Foreign Affairs, and in 2016, the theme of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, was "Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution". In his 2015 article, Schwab said that the first Industrial Revolution was powered by "water and steam" to "mechanize production". Through electrical power, the second industrial revolution introduced mass production. Electronics and information technologies automated the production process in the third industrial revolution. In the fourth industrial revolution the lines between "physical, digital and biological spheres" have become blurred and this current revolution, which began with the digital revolution in the mid-1990s, is "characterized by a fusion of technologies". This fusion of technologies included "fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing."Just before the 2016 annual WEF meeting of the Global Future Councils, Ida Auken, a Danish MP who was also a young global leader and a member of the Council on Cities and Urbanization, wrote an article that was uploaded to the official WEF website and later republished by Forbes in which she imagined how technology could improve people's lives by 2030 if the United Nations sustainable development goals were realized through this fusion of technologies. In the scenario presented by Auken, the emergence and application of new digitized technologies to sectors such as communication, energy, transportation, and accommodation would result in greater access and decreased cost, eventually leading to the end of "lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment" as well as other early 21st century crises. By the scenario's 2030 endpoint, anything that had once been a product was now a freely available service, obviating any need for personal ownership of goods or real estate. The article, originally titled "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better", has been criticized as portraying an unrealistic utopia at the cost of privacy. In response, Auken added an author's note in which she said that the article merely represented a potential future scenario rather than any personal utopia of her own and that it was intended to "start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development" in a way that she claimed conventional reports could not, while the article itself was renamed to "Here's how life could change in my city by the year 2030". Both versions of the article describe the loss of privacy as undesirable.
While the "interest in Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies" had "spiked" during the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than 9% of companies were using machine learning, robotics, touch screens and other advanced technologies. A 21 October 2020 WEF virtual panel discussed how organizations could harness fourth revolution technologies. On 28 January 2021, Davos Agenda virtual panel discussed how artificial intelligence will "fundamentally change the world". 63% of CEOs believe that "AI will have a larger impact than the Internet."
During 2020, the Great Reset Dialogues resulted in multi-year projects, such as the digital transformation programme where cross-industry stakeholders investigate how the 2020 "dislocative shock" had increased and "accelerated digital transformations". Their report said that, while "digital ecosystems will represent more than $60 trillion in revenue by 2025", "only 9% of executives say their leaders have the right digital skills".
"The Great Reset" was scheduled to be the theme of 2021 World Economic Forum summit in Davos, but this was postponed repeatedly to 2022. The 2022 Davos summit theme was "History at a Turning Point", and it was dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.