In June 2020, the theme of the January 2021 50th World Economic Forum [WEF] Annual Meeting was announced as “The Great Reset”, connecting global leaders both online and in person in Davos, Switzerland, with a network of stakeholders in 400 cities around the world. The Great Reset was also to be the main theme of the WEF’s summit in Lucerne in May 2021, which was postponed to 2022.

The WEF generally suggests that a globalized world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations (CSOs).^[8] It sees periods of global instability – such as the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – as windows of opportunity to intensify its programmatic efforts.

This has not sat well with elements of either the American far-right and conservatives or progressives and critics of neoliberal capitalism from the Far Left who view the rhetoric espoused by the concept of a “Great Reset” as either a grand conspiracy for “new world order” that masks a socialist takeover of the world or a re-branding of neo-liberalism as a corporate-controlled “stakeholder” driven privately-owned mega-monopoly driven by what the WEF has termed as the Fourth Industrial Revolution …whose Information Age breakthroughs in emerging technologies in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the internet of things, the industrial internet of things, decentralized consensus, fifth-generation wireless technologies, 3D printing, and fully autonomous vehicles promise rapid changes in the way humans create, exchange, and distribute value.

The result of all this is societal transformation at a global scale. By affecting the incentives, rules, and norms of economic life, it transforms how we communicate, learn, entertain ourselves, and relate to one another and how we understand ourselves as human beings and propel humankind into the Imagination Age … “a theoretical period beyond the Information Age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value”.

An imagination economy is defined by some thinkers as an economy where intuitive and creative thinking create economic value, after logical and rational thinking [drivers of the Information age] has been outsourced to other economies.  Michael Cox Chief Economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argues that economic trends show a shift away from information sector employment and job growth towards creative jobs. Jobs in publishing, he has pointed out are declining while jobs for designers, architects, actors & directors, software engineers and photographers are all growing.

Cox argues that the skills can be viewed as a “hierarchy of human talents”, with raw physical effort as the lowest form of value creation, above this skilled labor and information entry to creative reasoning and emotional intelligence. Each layer provides more value creation than the skills below it, and the outcome of globalization and automation is that labor is made available for higher level skills that create more value. Presently these skills tend to be around imagination, social and emotional intelligence.

Rita J. King has been the single major advocate of the Imagination Age concept and its implications on cultural relations, identity and the transformation of the global economy and culture. King has expounded on the concept through speeches at the O’Reilly Media and TED conferences and has argued that virtual world technology and changes in people’s ability to imagine other lives could promote world understanding and reduce cultural conflict. Some public policy experts have argued the emergence of the Imagination Age out of the Information Age will have a major impact on overall public policy.

 

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