Dan Steinbock, founder of Difference Group, biography

Biography

Dr Dan Steinbock (born 1954) is a an internationally-renowned expert of the world economy and international relations. His focus is on economic growth and development, equality and multipolarity, and globalization. His works cover not just the major advanced countries (“West”) but also the emerging and developing countries (“Global South”). His scope spans from historical colonialism to industrialization and globalization, including world trade and international affairs, global competition and technology innovation. Here's his great concern: While the world economy is increasingly multipolar, global governance remains mainly in the hands of few large high-income economies. The net effect, he argues, is rising international instability and inequality, and secular stagnation in the West. In extreme conditions, these outcomes have led to ethnic cleansing and genocidal atrocities, the dark side of Western modernity.

Early years

Born in Helsinki, Steinbock is of Jewish-Finnish descent with family roots in Viborg and St Petersburg. “Between West and East, I grew up as an insider and outsider,” he recalls. In the late 1970s, he gained national attention in Finland as a playwright, author, academic and intellectual trendsetter cooperating with humanist, socialist and ecological movements. Directed by the leading new wave directors Arto af Hällström and Raila Leppäkoski, his play Eyes (“Silmät,” 1979) confronted Finland’s political orthodoxies with a touch of the absurd.

In activism, it led to his cooperation with humanist, socialist and ecological movements, most notably the center-left culture journal Näköpiiri ("The Horizon") and its founder Eero Taivalsaari. Working with the Hashomer Hatzair labor activists, Steinbock spent time in Israel and kibbutzim through the 1970s.

Inspired by progressive and peace movements, he met the late Yael Dayan, the daughter of General Moshe Dayan, a peace advocate and feminist politician who would later be the first labor leader to meet Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO. Subsequently, in the mid-'70s, he joined the Peace Now demonstrations against the Gush Emunim settlers in the West Bank. Having protested Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, he translated to Finnish In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz, the co-founder of the Peace Now.

His semi-autobiographical Finnish novel Night ("Yö" in Finnish, 1980) examined the odd journey through history, antisemitism and family. It alluded to Holocaust survivors and authors, several of which he would later meet, including a memoir by Elie Wiesel whom he later befriended in New York City, and Se questo è un uomo ("If This Is a Man," 1959) by Primo Levi, the Holocaust author, who has described Steinbock as the "first critic anywhere" to see his "Kafkaesque refraction.”

In his early work, Internalized Domination (in Finnish, 1981) Steinbock explored the socio-economic shift to narcissism amid stagflation, based on clinical findings (Otto F. Kernberg, Heinz Kohut) and cultural critique (Christopher Lasch). It was the first of his 10 Finnish books. In his PhD dissertation (1983), Steinbock examined media economics in light of cultural theory. This led to his journey to New York City and interest in globalization.

Dr Steinbock was an early supporter of peace movements and nuclear-free Nordic Zone ("Ydinaseeton Pohjola)

Yael Dayan with PLO Chairman Jasser Arafat in the early 1990s

Competitiveness, innovation and globalization

In the mid-'80s, Steinbock served as Senior ASLA-Fulbright scholar in New York University cooperating with Neil Postman, an American author and cultural critic; Columbia University's Everette Dennis, the US journalism pioneer; and New School for Social Research, where he was inspired by a dear friend, the internationally-renowned photographer Ben Fernandez, who covered the U.S. civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and spent time with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In God Don’t Bless No Child (in Finnish, 1987), Steinbock documented Manhattan’s urban polarization across class, race and gender. "What Ben captured in photos, I hoped to convey through words," he recalls.

In the late 1980s, he served as a senior researcher for the Academy of Finland analyzing the transformation of U.S. media economics in Triumph and Erosion in the American Media and Entertainment Industries (1995), awarded by the foundation of Finland’s largest daily Helsingin Sanomat. In the process, he interviewed many of the leading Hollywood and media luminaries from Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to studio and network executives. The late media historian Christopher Sterling called the book “a valuable financial analysis of recent changes and trends in the entertainment industry.”

Supported by Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, Dr Steinbock began internationally pioneering virtual videoconferencing lectures, as a virtual professor of Helsinki School of Economics, lecturing from New York City. Serving as a new media analyst, he interviewed the pioneers of Silicon Valley, including Intel's founding father, Dr Gordon Moore (the architect of "Moore's Law"), CEO Craig Barrett and many others, and the NYC new media, while serving on boards of venture capital firms and startups in Europe.

Around 2000, Steinbock cooperated with Vice President Gore's technologists who were intrigued by Nordic mobile pioneership hoping to "mobilize" US internet networks. "But with the controversial Republican election victory, those plans were buried," he recalls. At the time, he also wrote a report to European Commission on why the EU fell behind the US in science and technology, venture capital and startups. And he served as an OECD rapporteur on the affinities between Finnish Silicon Valley, Ireland's Silicon Docks and Israel's Silicon Wadi.

"As I flew back and forth between NYC and European capitals, I saw intimately the Internet revolution in America and the mobile revolution in Scandinavia," he recalls. "I realized I was uniquely positioned to tell the story." His subsequent books focused on the Internet revolution and mobility, including The Nokia Revolution (2001), about a “surprising success story" (Foreign Affairs) and a “Nordic hero” (BusinessWeek). Among other languages, it was translated to Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Portuguese.

These works led to a slate of books focusing on the global information and communication technology (ICT) sector, including The Wireless Horizon (2002), The Mobile Revolution (2005), Winning Across Global Markets (2010), endorsed by industry leaders of Nokia, Intel, Eriksson, Motorola, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Microsoft, New York Times, Dow Jones Interactive (Wall Street Journal), Verizon, Ogilvy and many others. "When I wrote my first briefs on the rise of Chinese multinationals and Chinese and Indian innovators for The National Interest around 2005-8, observers still saw both as low-price havens," he recalls. "In reality, China was already emerging as a science and technology power."

These works were preceded by interviews with the pioneer of business history, Harvard's Alfred D. Chandler, whose approach influenced him; two-decade-long cooperation with the innovator of strategy. Michael E. Porter and his global cluster network; lecturing in the NYU Emerging Countries Study Group; and collaborations with Eli M. Noam, a developer of global digital media at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI).

[Left] Martin Luther King Jr near UN in 1967, by Ben Fernandez. [Right] God Don't Bless No Child by Dan Steinbock in 1987

Alfred D Chandler, Harvard University.png

Alfred D. Chandler Michael Porter

Rise of China, Global South and Multipolarity

In 2009, Dr Steinbock had a talk with Jim O'Neill, the Goldman Sachs analyst who coined the term BRICS for the large emerging economies. The two discovered that September 11, 2001 had changed the lives of each. That day, O'Neill was amid a conference call as his colleagues perished. Steinbock was due to a meeting in the World Trade Center, but late. Subsequently, O'Neill began to explore the positive potential of globalization. Steinbock did the same, but felt that the task requires understanding the legacies of colonialism, late industrialization and global subjection. "If we don't know where we are coming from," he says, "how can we know where we are going to?"

Having lived through September 11, 2001, and its aftermath in New York City, Steinbock decided to return to his early interest in development, world economy and international relations. “If we don’t get ‘globalization’ right, 9/11 will be a prelude to far worse," he thought. "We need peace and development, not geopolitics and friction.” Later, in a searing critique, he argued that the post-9/11 wars, with their huge human and economic costs, were misguided, illegal and disastrous.

With the rise of China, India and other large emerging economies, he joined India, China and America Institute (ICA), founded by Dr Jagdish N. Sheth of Emory University, a prominent member of the early Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. As the West seemed to follow Japan toward secular stagnation, Steinbock foresaw the repercussions of the subprime plunge in 2005 serving on BusinessWeek's media board. "It was around then, too, that I began to work with Michael Porter's international cluster network," he says, "lecturing in New York City, Helsinki, Shanghai, Tokyo and elsewhere - and Executive MBA classes worldwide.

But as he taught Harvard case studies, he coupled traditional case studies on companies operating in the US, Europe and Japan, with those emerging from the BRICS economies and Global South. Furthermore, he had grown increasingly uneasy about the assumptions of classic case studies. "Typically, 'sound macroeconomic fundamentals' were habitually linked with the kind of neoclassical economics that was accelerating wealth and income polarization worldwide," he argued. "What was so 'sound' about that?"

Zooming on China, India, and Southeast Asia

After lecturing in the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS), a global think-tank advising Shanghai municipality and the central government, he served as visiting senior fellow at SIIS and lectured in China’s leading universities (Fudan, Tsinghua etc) and many think-tanks in Chinese megacities. He also began to contribute to leading media in the US, Europe, China and India, including CNBC, EUobserver, China Daily and Qrius or the former Indian Economist (for sample selections, scroll down for the section on "Selected Commentaries").

At the turn of 2008-9, he predicted that restoring full employment in America would take until the mid-2010s. The contrarian prediction proved valid, as did his projections on the lingering debt crises in the US and EU. In 2011, he served as visiting fellow in the EU Centre (Singapore) meeting several ASEAN luminaries (incl. Tommy Koh and Ong Keng Yong). That paved way to his keynotes and lecturing in East Asia (Japan, South Korea) and most Southeast Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myarmar). In the mid-2010s, he contributed to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading US global innovation think-tank led by John D. Atkinson, with cutting-edge reports on the erosion of US civilian and defense innovation.

As his scope broadened to cover all major developed and developing economies and cities, he contributed for several years to the financial hub of EconoMonitor (RGE Monitor) by NYU Prof. Nouriel Roubini, one of the few international economists who warned about the coming of the 2008/9 recession years in advance, and to leading media in China, India, and other large emerging economies.

Together with Goldman Sachs analysts, Jim O'Neill coined the term BRICS.

Dr Jagdish Sheth with Indian PM Narendra Modi

With GE's late CEO Jack Welch

Keynote on EU-China ties in a European Chamber conference in Guangzhou.

Dr Steinbock with SIIS Emeritus Chairman Jiemian Yang

Dr Steinbock lecturing on the EU Debt crisis at INSEAD Singapore

Secular stagnation in the West, rise of the Global South

At the eve of the 2012 congressional hearing of Huawei and ZTE, Steinbock argued in The Case for Huawei in America, that Huawei's entry into the U.S. market would bring capital and jobs and calm U.S.-Sino tensions. In the reverse case, he expected trade friction to escalate to technology wars, possibly a new Cold War. Those wars took off half a decade later, as he had anticipated. Based on classified evidence, the Republican-led House Intelligence panel claimed the Chinese-made equipment could put US networks at risk from “foreign espionage.” The Obama administration had a more nuanced take on Dr Steinbock's argument.

In 2016, Dr Steinbock projected that the UK election would result in the Brexit, but that it would also accelerate the kind of economic decline that conservative geopolitics could further intensify. As he predicted, global recovery in 2017 was derailed, thanks to the Trump trade and technology wars, thus further weakening global prospects. At the APAC Summit keynote, he warned about a potential Russia-Ukraine war in the near future - it followed a few years later.

In 2020, he scrutinized the massive COVID-19 human and economic costs worldwide in The Tragedy of Missed Opportunities and The Tragedy of More Missed Opportunities. Compounded by vaccination colonialism, he expected the consequences of the post-pandemic global depression to be particularly severe in the Global South.

In February 2022, Dr Steinbock projected that US stagflation, the Fed's belated hikes, Russia proxy war and sanctions, energy and commodity shocks, and subsequent geopolitical friction would further undermine global prospects, deepen secular stagnation in the West and growth deceleration in the Global South, leaving behind failed states and hollow economies.

During the pandemic years, Dr Steinbock worked on a set of reports on global economy, international relations, trade wars and multipolar innovation. As he set out to publish the books, the Gaza War that he had expected and warned about for years took off.

In March 2022, Steinbock called the Russia-Ukraine conflict "The avoidable war that will penalize severely Ukraine, Russia, the US and the NATO, Europe, developing economies and the global economy."

Development, de-development and genocide in the Middle East

After 1973, when Steinbock first toured in all occupied territories, he "saw the settlements as a ticking time bomb that could subvert Israeli democracy and endanger its Jewish and Arab citizens and Palestinians." Furthermore, this time bomb "could morph into apartheid and cause a cycle of ‘forever wars’ in the regional neighborhood.” In 2018, he characterized the Israel-Palestine crisis as a 50-year time bomb arguing that a war just a matter of time.

After October 7, 2023, he predicted that Israel's grossly disproportionate response to the Hamas offensive would foster regional escalation. In months, he published The Fall of Israel (2025) which was first translated to German. He argued that Israel's economy, politics and military were under fast erosion, accelerated by a dual state, Messianic far-right, genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank's de facto annexation and regional escalation.

John Mearsheimer, the pioneer of offensive realism, believed "The Fall of Israel does an outstanding job explaining the causes and the evolution of the disastrous path that Israel is on." In addition to a leading US political scientist, the book was endorsed by two former European foreign ministers (Mogens Lykketoft, Erkki Tuomioja), Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff (Lawrence Wilkerson), Israeli, Palestinian and Iranian professors (Ilan Pappe, Seyed Hossein Mousavian) and human rights activists (Jonathan Kuttab, Alfred De Zayas).

Only months later, he published another book on The Obliteration Doctrine (summer 2025) focusing not just Israel and Gaza, but particularly on the West's longstanding failures in genocide prevention, which he now considers "systemic."

Israeli author and the co-founder of Peace Now Amos Oz and Steinbock in 1982

Advisory activities

Steinbock has had media advisory tasks in 1to1 Media, Fortune, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, McKinsey Quarterly Online Executive Panel, and so on. He has given keynotes at financial, investment, credit risk, pension and insurance events. He has been interviewed for the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends and the Economist EIU Insights. In his native Finland, he has briefed the president, prime ministers, ministers, multiple parliamentary committees. His commentaries and interviews have been released by more than 300 major media outlets in all world regions, from CNBC and CNN to Al Jazeera and China’s CGTN; from Wall Street Journal and Economist to China Daily and Xinhua and Qrius (India) and BusinessDay (Nigeria).

Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds is the fifth installment in the National Intelligence.

Some Selected Works
(1995) Triumph and Erosion in the American Media and Entertainment Industries (Quorum)
(2001) The Nokia Revolution. New York: Amacom.
(2005) The Rise of the Chinese Multinationals, The National Interest, Sep. 1
(2005) The Mobile Revolution (Kegan Paul)
(2007) New Innovation Challengers, The National Interest
(2010) Reassessing U.S. Policy toward China, American Foreign Policy Interests, Vol 32, 2010(6)
(2012) The Case for Huawei in America. Huawei US.
(2012) The Eurozone Debt Crisis, American Foreign Policy Interests, Vol34, 2012(1)
(2014) The Challenges for America's Defense Innovation, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
(2015) China’s Big Debt Swap, Foreign Affairs, Mar. 18
(2015) American Innovation Under Structural Erosion, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
(2017) The Trump Administration’s IP Battle against China, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Nov. 14
(2017) The Great Shift of Globalization: From the Transatlantic Axis towards China and Emerging Asia, China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies, Vol. 03, No. 02, pp. 193-226
(2018) The Great Dollar Debacle. The World Financial Review, Nov.-Dec.
(2018) US-China Trade War and Its Global Impacts, China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies Vol. 04, No. 04, pp. 515-542
(2020) The Tragedy of Missed Opportunities, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, Aug. [on the economic and human costs of Covid-19]
(2020) The Tragedy of More Missed Opportunities, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, Aug.
(2021) “Playing Genocide Politics: The Zenz-Xinjiang Case.” The World Financial Review, Jun.
(2021) “Apple Caught Between the U.S. and China.” China-US Focus, Jun. 25
(2022) “The global risk of weaponization in semiconductors” Global Policy Sep.
(2022) Great Powers and Globalization: Spotlight on the United States and China [TBA], Jun.
(2022) “The Unwarranted War: The avoidable war that will penalize severely Ukraine, Russia, the US and the NATO, Europe, developing countries and the global economy.” The World Financial Review, Mar.
(2023) “The Unwarranted Ukraine Proxy War: A Year Later.” The World Financial Review, Jan
(2024) “Making or Breaking Finland's Future: A Behind- the-façade Look at Finland After the 2024 Election.” The European Financial Review, Feb.
(2025) The Fall of Israel. Clarity Press.
(2025) The Obliteration Doctrine: The West’s Failure of Genocide Prevention. Clarity Press.