The following is a book review of COVID-19: The Great Reset, by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret that I posted to Amazon.ca.

This is an odd review to write. While I think the policy prescriptions in COVID-19: The Great Reset are… misguided, to put it nicely… I do see some value in reading this book if only so that you can better understand the mindset of the man who chairs the World Economic Forum and is occasionally photographed dressed like some sort of Mortal Kombat character. Perhaps this is a book best borrowed for free from the library.

Once I moved past the alarming title, COVID-19: The Great Reset was more nuanced than I expected. Schwab and the other guy make a few interesting predictions about our post-COVID future, for example, businesses optimizing for resiliency over profit or “local tourism” becoming the king of the travel industry. However, readers don’t need to be particularly astute to pick up on the elitist, ends-justify-the-means attitude that underlies every page of the book. I’ll give you an example with one of my favorite(?) quotes:

“… a state emergency can only be justified when a threat is public, universal and existential. In addition, political theorists often emphasize that extraordinary powers require authorization from the people and must be limited in time and proportion. One can agree with the former part of the assertion (public, universal and existential threat), but what about the latter?”

(page 101)

Schwab hits an odd mix of both acknowledging globalism’s role in exacerbating the massive societal and economic upheaval brought about by COVID-19, while putting forth a solution that appears to be… to double down on globalism. And by that I mean to convince (if not force) national governments to give up sovereignty to supranational bureaucracies such as, well, the World Economic Forum.

“Problems that affect the entire world require the entire world to cooperate in order to fix them” is the gist of the book’s message. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of well-meaning people agree with that idea, but I would encourage those people to scrutinize a little more closely the track records and beliefs of organizations that claim to speak for all the world’s inhabitants before they surrender their rights, privacy, and livelihoods.

Final Verdict

I give COVID-19: The Great Reset two protein-rich insects out of five.