David Rothkopf Parties with the Global Elite
Published 32 months ago
The author of Superclass on what the very powerful are really like.
David Rothkopf is a Washington-based journalist, scholar, consultant, and former deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policy under Bill Clinton. His new book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making is about the 6,000 most powerful people in the world: politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, terrorists and even the very occasional writer or scientist.
Dazed Digital: You've met a lot of these very powerful people at Davos World Economic Forum and elsewhere. How do they compare to the rest of us as human beings?David Rothkopf: They tend to be extraordinarily driven, energetic, monomaniacal in their focus on whatever they're doing. Also, the reality is that, despite all the prevailing wisdom to the contrary about the "dead, empty lives of billionaires", if you've got a billion dollars, you tend to be a little bit happier than everybody else.
DD: Have you seen Iron Man yet? Tony Stark has a lot of fun.DR: Certainly if you had a billion dollars and you could create a titanium alloy suit and fly around and defeat bad guys, that would be especially good.
DD: Do you think Americans and Europeans have different attitudes to these very powerful people?DR: Americans tend to believe that the system generally works, and are more likely to defend a system that enriches a few people to a great extreme by saying that we live in a meritocracy and we need incentives for people to be innovative. Whereas most of the people in the rest of the world say that the situation has gotten outrageous in terms of inequity, and the game is pretty much rigged. So in Europe and around the world there is a much more immediate, intuitive embrace of the idea that this is not a sustainable condition.
DD: How do the powerful themselves feel?DR: Many point out that if we were alive a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, this power and wealth would have been inherited, whereas today 75% of people are self-made.
DD: Do you like the Superclass?DR: I admire a great many of them. But a few are venal and extreme and kind of repulsive. I sat down with several leading Wall Street types who had completely rationalised away any sense of social responsibility or obligation to the community in which they live, and it's nauseating. That's why we need to make sure our global systems can balance that behaviour out. I think it's very dangerous to rely on charitable impulses from people who got where they are because of greed – that's against their nature.
DD: What's Davos like?DR: Davos has this mystique but basically it's a really big conference with really bad food. And it's the world's great bloviation festival. If you're in finance or government, what you say in public forum at Davos is what your press department or your communications department have prepared for you to say. The real value of Davos is never in the programs themselves, it's in the cocktail parties, the dinners, even the hallways.
DD: There's been a lot of controversy over whether raising taxes for non-domicile millionaires in London will drive them away. What do you think?DR: Cities and states need to recognise that for global players, there's a lot of comparison shopping going on. There's a market. So a rich individual can say "If I don't like your rules, I'll just move to New York or Tokyo." At the same time, none of these decisions are made on the basis of money alone – there are lots of other metrics, and London has lots of other competitive advantages, whether it's the culture or the stock market disclosure laws. People who are saying "Let's tip toe around these guys" are mostly apologists. And giving these guys a free pass is going way too far. If they're not paying taxes, who benefits from their staying in London? Their gardeners and their plumbers?
DD: Your day job is at a consulting company you co-founded.DR: It's a small company focusing on green energy. We help companies make investments and strategic decisions in solar power, wind power, biofuels, algae, all kinds of new green energy technology. We are very, very technical. It's nice to have a job where you can show up each day and feel you're helping someone out. I once worked for a magazine on Wall Street, and I had the sense that all we were doing was helping to stir the big pot of money.
