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The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland

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Davos without a Translator

Every year in Davos, Switzerland a number of the world's great and good--or at least powerful and egocentric--meet for a few days at the World Economic Forum to discuss the economic destiny of humanity. Business executives, central bankers, politicians, intellectuals, futurologists, journalists--all descend to hear each other make speeches and to talk to each other in the halls.

To this assembly went Lewis Lapham, the somewhat iconoclastic high-ranking member in good standing of the American literary establishment. The Agony of Mammon is his report of what he heard there. My initial set of reactions on picking up this book were three:

First, the book is so short--only 80 pages, big print, each page only 6" x 4". It has a total of 19,000 words. Printed with normal margins in 12-point Times, its manuscript must have taken up only 48 pages. For Verso to charge... ...times the cost of xeroxing the manuscript for each copy--strikes me as extremely self indulgent. Books are supposed to be a more efficient way of reproducing text than a xerox machine. If Verso doesn't make money on this book, shame on them for gearing up the machinery of modern printing for something with such a trivial print run. If they do make money on this book, shame on them for overcharging those who bought the book.

Second, the book seems to miss the thing that is most interesting about the annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum: that it happens at all, and that it is thought newsworthy by those who are not there. In previous eras the meetings that were of genuine interest were those between princes to decide between war and peace, or between churchmen to decide which of their number were heretics to be burned at the stake and which districts would suffer the fire and sword of the crusade. But in this era people meet to talk about monetary policy, productivity, business organization. To me at least that is a very hopeful sign--commerce and productivity being much more pleasant things to experience than war or excommunication. Yet Lewis Lapham doesn't seem to be aware that in the long historical perspective economics is an unusual subject for a worldwide newsworthy meeting.

Third, when Lewis Lapham arrives in Davos it soon becomes clear that he does not understand what he is hearing. When MIT economist Rudiger Dornbusch calls for the rich investors of New York and Frankfurt to be forced to eat a large share of the collective losses from the East Asian financial crisis, Lewis Lapham hears Rudi as a voice calling for "austerity"--a voice saying the same thing as the central bankers who say that European unemployment benefits are too high or the corporate princes who urge that the last shreds of the social-democratic welfare state need to be purged from South America. But Rudi was saying something completely different from the central bankers and the corporate princes: Rudi's point was that the East Asian financial crisis had already destroyed great wealth, and the question was whether the richest 1% were going to pay or the non-richest 99%. Rudi's speech was a message of anti-austerity. But that was not what Lewis Lapham heard.

Why not? Because Lewis Lapham doesn't speak the language. He doesn't understand the denotation of the words that he heard at Davos--that when X was said, it meant that Y was excluded, and that everyone else there understood the functioning of the economy well enough to know that if you wanted Q you also had to take R, and that S and T were compatible only in the absence of U. And Lewis Lapham did not take along a translator: there was no economist tagging along behind him to point out that he had failed to understand Rudi Dornbusch, or the Chinese entrepreneur for whom the coming of the pager to China is a big deal, or George Soros, or Alan Greenspan, or indeed the organizer Klaus Schwab, or in all probability most of the other people he talked to. As a reporter of what was actually said and meant at Davos, Lewis Lapham is the ultimate unreliable narrator.

But if he did not understand denotations, what then did he hear? And this is where the book becomes truly interesting. For not understanding the denotations he is forced to listen to the connotations: the emotional penumbra cast by the thoughts and ideas had and expressed at Davos. And in his listening to the connotative penumbra he hears four interesting--and I think very true--things.

* That in their claims to control--or even to understand--the course of the global economy, high politicians are faking it: Bill Clinton's "fine pose of high presidential seriousness was exactly that--a pose, an extended television commercial, a department store window display." That is not to say that there are not half-successful attempts to manage the global economy: there are, and they are half-successful. But politicians who promise all good things to all people and deny that there are choices (more insurance against global warming or more minivans? faster economic growth or smaller recessions?) are not the ones who make them.

* The uneasy combination of confidence in the utility and rightness of market forces--the market as the creator of wealth and efficiency, and also as the rewarder of industry and expertise--with the awareness that "...the market, like God, didn't always answer everybody's prayers... and that the world was a more uncertain place than one might guess sitting here on the terrace of the Berghotel Schatzalp..."

* "The sincerity of... [the] devotions or the wealth of... [the] good intentions" of those who had come to Davos to discuss the state of the world--but coupled with their inability to understand how the world was going to move, for the attendees at Davos were the world's best managers, not politicians, not visionaries. And it was politicians and visionaries that are needed to lead, not managers.

* The extraordinary role of Alan Greenspan--who truly has been "outfitted" (albeit not hastily) by the globe's businessmen and speculators with proconsular power to calm the world economy...

So definitely a recommended book.

But don't read it if you don't understand monetary policy, or the world economy--you will wind up confused because you will try to read it for the denotations, and you can't because Lewis Lapham doesn't understand them.

And don't buy it, period: it is socially inefficient--wasteful of time and energy and resources--to put the covers of a book around a manuscript so small. If the market is going to work as a social planning and resource allocation mechanism, organizations like Verso need to be punished for their destructive deviancy. Instead of buying it, read it in the bookstore. It will only take you at most thirty minutes, after all.

Every winter, some 2000 members of a modern cargo cult make their way to the resort of Davos. They seek, like other supplicants, enlightenment in the high mountains, in their elusive delusive Shangri-La. They confer and network and ruminate, seeking to divine the movements of their inscrutable God. And they search for the seers who will reveal the truth.

Who are these modern cultists? Well, they call themselves 'the great and the good'. They certainly preach a great deal of good, for ever propounding the virtues of insecurity and austerity for others, of security and wealth for themselves.

Conspicuous amongst them last year were representatives of two of the world's most arrogant Governments. Helmut Kohl was there promoting the euro, telling members that it would be introduced, whether the peoples of Europe liked it or not. And the US Ambassador to the United Nations boasted how he told the UN's members that "we will send the bombers no matter what you decide to do."

Coincidentally, Thomas Mann set his great novel The Magic Mountain in Davos. There, his characters lived in states of advanced and terminal ennui, induced by their endless vague ratiocinations, but at least their deliberations did no harm to others: they suffered, but did not inflict suffering on others.

These modern cultists suffer the same ennui, induced by their endless seminars, networking and presentations. They have the shared delusion, that capitalism, a system driven by pitiless self-seeking, brings universal benefits. For the system that they worship, now for the first time imposed virtually worldwide, is at once plunged into near universal decline. Living standards fall, and unemployment rises, across the globe. Wars and social disintegration spread.

This witty book beautifully deflates the pretensions of these characters. All their clumsy deliberations cannot hide the fact that their preferred solution, unfettered capitalism, is the problem; the problem they abhor, socialism, is the solution.

Imagine Britain's Charles Handy a master chef or William Greider a Picasso painter and you approach the sensual pleasure of reading Lewis Lapham on world economics, especially a meeting such as Davos.

Lapham's "The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland" is an engaging self-proclaimed outsider's look at the January 1997 meeting of Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum. First organized in 1971, WEF (for those in the know, simply 'Davos' will apparently do) is an annual international summit of policy, business and media leaders in the Swiss Alps. Lapham found himself among the elites of the elites when he was invited as a participant (for whom the nearly $20,000 in registration fees are waived) and greeted with a sterling white ID badge -- several ranks above the orange passes traditionally reserved for members of the working press.

Upon making the initial trek up the funicular to the conference venue Lapham writes of, "...heads of state, finance ministers, policy intellectuals, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, corporate executives as thick upon the ground as pine needles."

Later, through characteristically Laphamian eyes he observes, "...the lesser nations of the earth become colonies not of governments but of corporations, the law of nations construed as the rule of money, and the world's parliaments intimidated by the force of capital in much the same way that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they had been intimidated by the force of arms."

Lapham's lively, self-effacing style is always a joy to read -- even if one often suspects that he is among the last to believe his own quiet hyperbole.

This book describes the Davos scene in winter. Davos, in case you have not received your invitation yet, is where the elite meet on an annual basis to discuss the mega-issues facing mankind. More precisely, it's where buyers (banks) and sellers (governments) come together to discuss investment possibilities -- risk and reward. That's all fine, and Lapham's description of the event strikes me as reasonably accurate. But here's the reason to look at this slim book. Take a look at the pages wherein Bill Richardson, then the US Secretary to the UN, describes Saddam Hussein and the threat posed. For a minute, forget that you are reading about views expressed during the Clinton Administration. Remarkably consistent argument across Administrations. In Richardson's words, "He's asking to be bombed."

The Agony of Mammon is Lewis Lapham's account of his field trip to the 1998 WEF at Davos. As a book based around a subject as complex as global economics, it is pleasantly short and readable. One strong point of the book, for me anyways, is that Lapham doesn't ever seem to make his human research subjects-the participants of the WEF- into unwitting caricatures of themselves by typing them as selfish monsters who recklessly control the majority of the worlds resources in an effort to achieve domination. That is, until one reads the satirical glossary at the end of the book.
Certainly not engaging, but overall a digestible, refreshing, mostly non-partisan glimpse into the hopelessly social aspects of a particular event which anyone reading this review will probably never ever participate in.

I was expecting more quotes to let me get a feel on what it was like to be there. Most of what was said in the book I could've guessed for myself without ever having stepped foot in Davos.