I guess it's fashionable this year to dis Davos.
Yesterday's post quoted from a fairly conservative source (the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal). But here's another piece entitled "Why the Davos Smart Set Sounds Dumb" on the solidly Democratic site Politico.
It is not that the observations and arguments are notably dumb, though it is rare to hear something arrestingly smart. The signature of most conversations about current events is how emphatically commonplace they are. ... Outsiders, however, should liberate themselves from the illusion that these insiders really know the score.
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There’s no reason to pick on Davos. It is just an especially concentrated setting ...
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The youthful tendency is to believe these people have access to hidden pathways of information and world-shaping insight.
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One can look at the phenomenon ... from different angles. The first ... many conversations about the news revolve around inherently imponderable subjects ...
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The second way to think about it is that insights ... have been radically democratized over recent generations. ... weakened by cable news and demolished by social media.
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The final point is that even the most highly credentialed people can be vexed by modern life — even in their own areas of expertise.
That may be the real lesson of Davos: Everyone is winging it, experts and schlubs alike, muddling through with at best fragmentary understandings of a fast-moving world and its inscrutable future.
Again, I emphasize that the problem is not that experts don't know what they're doing: the world is a hard place to figure out.
Rather, it's our belief that they do know what they're doing, and their cheerleading for themselves that encourages our belief.
The message here is that if macroeconomics ends up piquing your interest, read more textbooks, and listen less to people in positions of power (who may have taken less classes on this than you have).
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