As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a seemingly endless summer of globalization began—thirty golden years in which the only question worth asking was how to stimulate demand. But what happens when the world turns on its own axis and the problem is no longer finding consumers, but actually producing anything at all? David Baverez, a financial strategist who has spent the past decade observing China from Hong Kong, argues that 2022 marks precisely such a rupture: not only the return of geopolitical conflicts but also a fundamental shift from a peace economy to a war economy—an economy measured not by GDP per capita, but by who controls the supply bottlenecks. The question is whether Europe, caught between American financial hegemony and Chinese dominance in production, still has anything to offer—or whether the freedom to think is already a luxury of the past. Despite the somber topic, the conversation with David Baverez was laced with lightheartedness, due in no small part to Baverez’s exceptionally witty way of bringing big issues down to earth and driving the point home.

David Baverez is a forward-thinking French private investor and author who sometimes describes himself as a Business Angel/Demon on his Medium page. After spending 15 years between London and Boston — including a decade at Fidelity Investments managing European and Global Equity funds — he co-founded KDA Capital with Krishnan Sadasivam in 2005, returning all funds to investors at the end of 2010 in an early and contrarian bet against European sovereign debt. He has since lived in Hong Kong as a private investor and author who has written on the emergence of the New China on global economics, including Welcome to the War Economy! He is also a columnist for various media outlets, including L’Opinion, Les Echos, and Sans doute.

David Baverez has published

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There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:

»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«

Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.

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Given that we’re said to live in an Information Society, the idea that an entire Nation could succumb to a form of mass hysteria similar to medieval delusions of sacrilege and infanticide would normally be unthinkable. The Canadian scandal involving the Kamloops child deaths, which kept all of Canada on edge for quite some time, exemplifies such an incident—a moral panic that led the Canadian Prime Minister, in a display of national shame, to lower the country’s flags to half-mast. And because the public held the Catholic Church responsible for the alleged murders, Pope Francis was also asked to apologize—a request he humbly fulfilled during a six-day penitential pilgrimage to Canada. The fact that the affair eventually faded away did not, of course, lead to a full reckoning—and this is precisely why we should turn our attention to this question of how such a moral panic could have emerged in the Information age. It was Tom Flanagan who caught our attention because, as a political scientist, he has published two books on the subject (along with others); additionally, he is not only a recognized expert on Canadian colonial history but also has a deep familiarity with how politics operate, thanks to his long tenure as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.

Tom Flanagan has recently puplished

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