Great Reset

The Great Reset, also known as the Great Reset Initiative, is an economic recovery plan that was proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020. Its stated objective is to support global recovery from the pandemic in a manner that emphasizes sustainable development. At the time of the initiative's announcement, WEF chairman Klaus Schwab outlined three core components of the initiative: advancing a "stakeholder economy" prioritizing "fairer outcomes"; building a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" economy using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and "harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution." "The Great Reset" was chosen as the theme for the WEF's 2021 annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a summit that was postponed multiple times and ultimately cancelled due to the pandemic. The Great Reset, and the WEF broadly, have been criticized by scholars and commentators for encouraging economic deregulation and expanding the influence of private corporations, particularly multinational corporations, in policymaking at the expense of governmental authority. Others have argued that the project regards health outcomes as a singularly important social macro trend and exaggerates the ability of a small group of decision-makers to reshape the global economy, or that it amounts to crony capitalism. The initiative became the focus of conspiracy theories circulated mainly by conservative commentators on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Conspiratorial claims included that the pandemic had been engineered by a secret group to control the global economy, that lockdowns were intentionally designed to cause economic collapse, or that a global elite sought to abolish private property while using vaccines to subjugate populations. Such theories gained traction when political leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, referred...