The Era of Markets ended in 2019. What comes next?

EARLIER this week at the Davos World Economic Forum, I dined with fellow attendees at the Hotel Schatzalp, a former sanatorium that featured in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain.

It felt oddly appropriate. In Mann’s 1924 work, life in a tuberculosis sanatorium reflects a profound sense of an outside world in flux. The political and economic structures that had dominated Europe in the 19th century had recently been decimated by World War I. Nobody quite knew how to articulate the new era. Phrases such as the Roaring Twenties had yet to emerge and the Great Depression was still a few years away.

A century later, similar angst is afoot. The elite leaders who participate at Davos generally built their careers in the West assuming that the trifecta of globalisation, free-market capitalism and democracy were self-evidently good things destined to keep spreading around the world.