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The Davos-Platz district of the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland © Reuters It
has been over two years, and I have to say that I’m really not looking
forward to this week on the Magic Mountain. For starters, I am pretty
sure that the last time I was at the World Economic Forum in January of
2020, I got Covid-19 (both Niall Ferguson and I believe it may have been
a superspreader event,
which maybe is fitting for a place that used to be a sanatorium). This
time around, it’s meant to rain the entire time, so women at least will
be forced to do the cumbersome outside-to-inside, boot-to- fancy-shoe
swap, but without all the atmospheric snow. Perhaps this year, the two dozen or so women with full participant badges in attendance (OK, maybe there
are a few more now) should all make a pact to wear our ugly boots on
stage at Sanada and say “screw it”. We aren’t intellectual geishas, as
our former FT colleague and current Canadian deputy prime minister
Chrystia Freeland once so aptly put it. We are working people, and we
are sick of pretending that anyone can walk down the promenade in heels
instead of lug soles. Sharan Burrow, if you keep your boots on, so will I! (#WEFbootjustice) Why
do we keep putting ourselves through this charade? The idea of the 0.1
per cent saving the world has been discredited by everyone from Anand Giridharadas to my good friend Peter Goodman, the New York Times reporter who wrote Davos Man: How Billionaires Devoured the World
and strangely enough is not in attendance this year. Hmmm. I wonder if
it was the book, or the time he took a picture of the bill from a faux
populist senator’s expensive lunch following his panel on inequality and
tweeted it. Peter,
my friend, we will miss you at the annual dinner of journalists
suffering from late-stage Davos dread, held every year by me and
Columbia professor Anya Schiffrin Stiglitz. It’s for hacks and their
friends only, on the last night of the week, when everyone either (a)
wants to kill themselves because of the pain and injustice of a world in
which the richest and most powerful people on the planet can spend
decades trying to fix things and accomplish nothing, or (b) feels
they’ve made terrible life choices relative to people who are not as
smart as they are, but far richer, or (c) knows they’ve made great life
choices but still just want to eat dinner with people who won’t use the
words “upskilling”, “synergy”, “close the loop” or “B2H” (that’s
business to human, folks, and no I am not joking). For
executives themselves, the point of Davos is simply that it’s just an
excellent place to network and make money, a kind of souk of big
deal-closing. For politicians and policymakers, it’s a place to make
lofty world view statements or grand gestures (remember Erdoğan walking
out of a debate with Shimon Peres and receiving a hero’s welcome on the
tarmac in Istanbul when he got home?). For media, it is economics of
scale — particularly for the FT, it’s a good chunk of the people you
might want to interview, all in one place. But
I have to say that in the future, I am hoping that we can move from
discussing the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a Brutalist concrete
slab, and head into the metaverse instead. We skip the flights, carbon
emissions, expenses and tiny food and just send our avatars to a pop-up
panel on what’s more inflated: crypto or the weekly prices being charged
for a two- star room with a Murphy bed on the promenade? |