Forget the reviled “1 percent”. This club is far more exclusive than that. The 2 500 men and women who will gather in Davos this week for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) constitute an economic elite that makes the verbal targets of protesters in London and Manhattan look like the great unwashed.
From Wednesday, corporate titans, senior bankers, wealthy entrepreneurs and top politicians from almost 100 countries will converge on a ski resort in Switzerland again, a short hike up the valley from Klosters.
As always, Davos has attracted a stunning list of delegates. That roll call makes Davos easily the planet’s greatest single concentration of money and power.
It is all a long way from the “European Management Symposium” of 1971, which was designed by German academic Klaus Schwab to offer European executives a chance to brainstorm in a convivial Alpine getaway. Ever since then, like a sphere of ice tumbling from the nearby summit of mount Jackobshorn, the WEF has been snowballing. It now has a membership of about 1 200 companies, most with a turnover measured in billions of dollars. It employs 750 people. Total revenue in 2011 was $157 million (R1.2 billion), although as a non-profit organisation any surplus is reinvested.
This year’s forum will feature 230 workshops on topics ranging from climate change, to the rise of Asia, to the use of music to bind communities together.
But what is Davos actually for? The WEF says its mission is to “improve the state of the world”. Yet is the world any better off for its existence? The “Occupy Davos” protesters, who are building an igloo camp just outside the security cordon, do not think so.
“It is the decisions of the few which have have led us into the crisis of recent years and now the same people are posing as the solution to these problems,” said David Roth of the Swiss Social Democrats.
And there are certainly grounds for some cynicism. The WEF’s organisers choose nebulous “themes” for the annual meetings that might have been plucked at random from a dictionary of management jargon. In 2011 it was “Shared norms for the new reality”. This year it is “The great transformation: shaping new models”. Next year’s forum may be devoted to “The great shared norm: shaping new realities”. Some delegates do not even attend the sessions, preferring to schmooze with clients. Deloitte chief executive James Quigley has said that Davos saves him 50 days of travel each year.
Bracing conflict can occur. Economists Nouriel Roubini and Joe Stiglitz have mercilessly torn into global bankers, perhaps one of the reasons that in 2009, the heads of Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley thought it prudent to stay away.
There are, though, limits to the top-down Davos approach. Last year’s meeting coincided with the outbreak of the mass demonstration in Egypt’s Tahrir square. It was a timely reminder that, while power-broking at the top has something to be said for it, fundamental change often comes from the bottom up.
The economic and political elite will gather in a single Swiss town, but the real action may still be elsewhere. – The Independent on Sunday