The Genesis of the Confetti Cannons

There is a book from 2006 that should be read today as an epitaph. Not because its author has died — Gabor Steingart is alive, runs a newsletter, hosts a podcast, stages events. He is more visible than ever. But the person who wrote that book no longer exists.

Weltkrieg um Wohlstand (World War for Prosperity) is not a kind book. It opens with a sentence that reverberates as a ground note through all four hundred pages: “We were born into a world that will soon cease to exist.” What follows is not a lament but a diagnosis. A threat assessment — the first that the West should have produced and never did.

He takes on everything. Colonial history as the dress rehearsal for globalisation. America’s rise and its illusory successes. China’s awakening under Deng Xiaoping. The emergence of a world labour market that overnight placed one and a half billion people in direct competition with three hundred and fifty million expensive Western workers.

The book’s power lies in the willingness to name things that no one wanted named. He calls the Asian rising powers “attacker states” — not out of hostility but because the word “trading partner” obscures reality. He calls the European welfare state “probably the largest import subsidy programme any state has ever devised.” He calls Europe’s debt-driven growth a “narcosis of the people.”

And then he takes on David Ricardo. He dismantles the wine-and-cloth model with three objections, any one of which would suffice. He conducts an interview with the ninety-one-year-old Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, who calmly confirms what Steingart has laid out across four hundred pages: that the globalisation balance sheet has tipped against the West, that there are losers, and that it is a great error to claim otherwise.

Steingart closes his chapter on Ricardo with a sentence that sounds like a eulogy for an entire epoch: “Their patron saint Marx has meanwhile been buried. It is time to pay David Ricardo the last honours as well.”

That was 2006. A book that spoke plainly, that asked systemic questions, that demanded of its readers that they seek answers rather than moods. The author was head of Der Spiegel’s Berlin bureau; he had access, he had authority, and he used both not to court but to diagnose.

What happened to this person?

In 2025, Gabor Steingart runs Pioneer, a newsletter with podcast and event format. Every morning at six he delivers to his subscribers a summary of the day: five points, three minutes, one conclusion. The Draghi Report on European competitiveness — four hundred pages of deep analysis — is referenced in a single briefing, summarily praised, not analysed. Symptoms are listed, causes are not questioned. The “why?” is missing — not occasionally, but systematically.

What has occurred can be captured in a single instrument: the confetti cannon. Take other people’s work — a four-hundred-page report, a government declaration, a study — cut it into colourful strips, throw it into the air, and call it “conclusion.” The confetti cannon produces effect without insight, attention without comprehension, the appearance of analysis without its substance.

The business model behind it is as intelligent as it is cynical: close enough to the truth to seem credible, far enough away to lose no one. The Steingart of 2006 called something like this “narcosis of the people.” He described the mood-politician — and then became one. Only not in politics but in journalism.

The transformation is not an isolated case; it is a pattern. In Germany there is a remarkable tradition: people who in their younger years named things plainly become, over the course of their careers, what they once described. The critic becomes the operation. The diagnosis becomes content. The truth, once published as a book and honoured with prizes, becomes a business card whose text no one reads any more.

Steingart wrote a chapter in 2006 titled “The New Honesty,” calling for a revolution in consciousness: that one must stop lying to oneself about the situation. Twenty years later, the same author delivers to his readership at six in the morning a pleasantly tempered summary in which everything is referenced and nothing understood. The honesty he demanded in 2006 would be fatal to his business model.

The real question is not why Steingart changed. The real question is what it says about a country when its sharpest analysts become confetti cannoneers. When diagnosis is not refined but abandoned. When the findings of 2006 are not developed over twenty years but forgotten.

Steingart demanded of his readers in 2006 that they endure two hundred pages on Asia before he offered a single strategy. He demanded that they take seriously the last sentence of his preface: “Good politics begins with speaking what is. This book aims to encourage that.”

Speaking what is — that cannot be done every morning at six. Not in five points. Not with sponsors behind you and subscribers in view. The confetti cannon is the operating system of a media logic that has replaced analysis with reference, diagnosis with enumeration, asking why with reporting what.

And therein lies the true irony: Steingart wrote a book about decline in 2006. He described decline, analysed it, documented it with numbers. And then he chose to become part of it himself. Not as a cynic. Probably not even consciously. But because the business model of the newsletter demands what the business model of the book forbade: proximity instead of imposition, confirmation instead of disruption, speed instead of depth.

Steingart wrote in 2006: “With concern for the voter-friendly communication of insight, insight itself disappears.” He was speaking about politicians. He could have been speaking about himself — twenty years later.