World Economic Forum Meeting This Week

 

The World Economic Forum is in the news this week. They are meeting in a resort town in Switzerland named Davos.

This event gets way more attention in the news than it deserves.

The event attracts leaders of country's governments and their attendants, leaders and attendants of NGO's, and celebrities.†

Perhaps I'm cynical, but I think part of the reason this event gets so much attention in the media is that most journalists are ... brown-nosers, bootlickers, sycophants, flunkies, fawners, or whatever term you like best. Importantly, acting this way definitely helps them get stories, so it's not like it's always a negative personality quirk. 

Anyway, the attendees at the World Economic Forum (which is rarely abbreviated to WEF, go figure) have some power or influence. But collectively, the group itself has nothing except a claim on a high moral position.

Here's the problem: the World Economic Forum is moribund and doesn't know it. For a scathing viewpoint on this, see "The Humiliation of Davos Man" by Walter Russell Mead.

On both the far left and the far right, conspiracy theorists see the WEF and its allies as an all-powerful network successfully imposing a nefarious agenda on the rest of the world. This reading gets Davos exactly wrong.

The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing. The Davos agenda—a global security order, an integrated world economy and progress toward objectives including decarbonization, gender equality and the abolition of dire poverty—is controversial in some quarters and on some points but is neither secret nor particularly nefarious. But far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies.

...

This isn’t, at its core, a crisis of trust. It is a crisis of competence. Why would voters expect an “expert class” that was so wrong for so long ...

“The emperor has no clothes!” is the cry of populists everywhere. To render this message ineffective, Davos Man doesn’t need image consultants and disinformation specialists. He needs to get dressed.

Harsh. True though.

† It's a good time in your college career to learn what an NGO is. It stands for Non Governmental Organization. There are thousands of these. Some examples might be the Red Cross, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Sierra Club, PETA, and so on.