The Great Reset

By Deane Barker • •

A book-length explanation of the goals of the project. This was written by the head of the WEF.

The Great Reset was an initiative proposed by the World Economic Forum in June 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In an article announcing its formation, the WEF urged the world to “rebuild” in ways that are more sustainable.

The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. To this end, governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.” At a time of diminishing tax bases and soaring public debt, governments have a powerful incentive to pursue such action.

The WEF has no official power, so there was no force behind this initiative. It was merely a proposal, and since the WEF is funded by 1,000 multi-national companies, there was virtually no chance that any of them would do anything individually that would be to their detriment (and certainly no chance they would all do this collectively).

However, the ideas of The Great Reset started to gain some momentum when world leaders began mentioning similar themes in their speeches. Concepts like “Build Back Better” implied a need to reconstruct the post-COVID world with changes.

Predictably, a murky, international organization proposing fundamental changes to society in the wake of a global emergency caused many conspiracy theories to emerge. The biggest theory is that the WEF – and the world’s global elite in general – engineered the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretense to seize control of the world’s economy.

The biggest thing the WEF is known for is the annual summit at Davos, Switzerland. The theme of the 2021 summit was scheduled to be “The Great Reset,” but that summit was postponed to 2022, and the theme was changed after Russian invaded Ukraine.

In the end, The Great Reset appeared to go nowhere. The pandemic passed, and the post-COVID world greatly resembles the pre-COVID world.

As of this writing, the link to the WEF’s microsite about The Great Reset results in an error.

Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for

Why I Looked It Up

I saw a book written by the head of the WEF:

COVID-19: The Great Reset

I had vaguely heard the term before, but it had gotten so wrapped up in misinformation and innuendo, that I wasn’t sure it was an actual thing, or just a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.

Humously (or tragically), in searching for that book, I realized it was absolutely dwarfed by the number of title positioning The Great Reset as a conspiracy to control the world.

Some titles:

…and so on.

And there was a prior book called The Great Reset written in 2010 by Richard Florida. It deals with economic recessions and how they tend to “reset” economies, but had nothing to do with the WEF’s initiative.

Postscript

Added on

In an article about hate speech on Substack, I found a quote from the BBC which characterized The Great Reset as:

A vague set of proposals from an influential organization has been transformed by online conspiracy theorists into a powerful viral rallying cry.

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