I haven't been to Davos in years, but I used to go regularly for Newsweek in the 1990s and early 2000s, and reading David Ignatius's latest about the "disconnected elites" who gather every year at that isolated Swiss ski resort reminded me of the horrified fascination I used to feel upon mingling with them. What's especially odd, as Ignatius puts it, is "the way in which the elite networking [Davos] represents has unintentionally worked to undermine social cohesion in the larger world." Over the years it became clear that it was because of in-bred forums like this that globalization proceeded in such a deluded way, chock full of Pollyannish promises a la Thomas L. Friedman, and the emerging problems of inequality of both income and opportunity were not given enough weight. On his TV show today, against the snowy backdrop of Davos, Fareed Zakaria termed the little berg where he and his fellow super-elites bathe and jacuzzi themselves in mutual love and admiration a "global public square," but that too is pretty silly and clueless. For one thing, we don't normally get nude protests in most public squares. Davos is a public square for billionaires and the intellectuals who feed off of them, and little more. From a piece I wrote from Davos in 2001:
Bill Gates,
perhaps the most iconic capitalist of our times, began to get disillusioned in the late ‘90s. Ten years earlier,
Gates had been one of the hard, glittery men of capitalism. When asked what he
would do with his billions in the early ‘90s, the boy wonder of Redmond used to
shrug off the question, saying his long work days didn’t leave time for charity
and that, in any case, all people needed to prosper were the right skills. But
by 2001 he and his wife Melinda were running the world’s largest charitable
foundation, sending billions of dollars to Africa to provide vaccines in
impoverished villages, and Gates was contemptuously dismissing the idea that
exporting his beloved computer culture might make a difference in such
down-and-out places.
In an interview, I asked Gates whether the systemic failures that
began jutting forth in the late ‘90s, like rocks from a draining lake, had
changed his confidence in the system. First he gave a Churchillian response,
saying that he couldn’t think of any good alternatives to capitalsm. But then
he expressed exasperation with his fellow elites, and by implication with “Washington
Consensus” policy-makers. "The thing that’s most surprised me is why
aren’t more people exposed to the gross
inequalities that exist,” he said. “If they were exposed they would act
politically and financially.”
Gates had it right. This
walled-off tendency, which for free-marketers began in the ivory towers of
academe and then extended to the sequestered offices of the Treasury and Fed
and the trading pits of Wall Street, reached a kind of symbolic climax in the
‘90s with the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland.
For
years, the annual meeting in the tiny Swiss mountain village--the
inspiration of an obscure Swiss professor named Klaus Schwab-- has been a living monument to globalization. Or what its elites
thought of as globalization. The Davos crowd is an odd, dazzling
collection of sober central bankers, rising and falling political stars, of big
brains and big-pocketed billionaires, who formed an elite club circling like a
star belt around the planet. During the annual meeting, they gather at the
Congress Center, a sprawling, gray-cement structure at the center of
town, whose every staircase and hallway is an artery for schmoozing. Networkers
set up power trysts by email, attend a barrage of parties and dinners, and
enjoy the snow, skiing and spartan Swiss aesthetic. Above all, Davosians love
the planned serendipity you can get only
from drawing A-listers together from around the world.
It is quite the power trip. But I would argue
that it was because of self-absorbed forums like this—not Davos alone, but the idea of Davos--that globalization became
so inbred, so one-dimensional. It is because of the Davos mindset that the
elite of the Washington Consensus never saw the backlash against globalization
until it was upon them. It is because of mutually reinforcing discussions at
forums like Davos, with their mild dissents uttered diplomatically at dinner,
that economists so confidently imposed a one-size-fits-all standard on
transitioning economies.
At the 2001
meeting, hundreds of anti-globalization protesters ascended the magic mountain.
Swiss police hosed them down and blocked roads into and out of Davos — at one
point even shutting down the ski funicular to avert an attack from the
mountains — while in Switzerland’s major cities, anti-globalist protesters ran
amok in the streets, doing millions of dollars in damage to store windows and
cars. Yet inside the Congress Center the schmoozing and networking went on,
unmolested. I remember marveling that here, in one of the famously cut-off
countries in the world, there existed a separate bubble world, itself wholly
isolated. One doesn’t get much more divorced from reality than that.
Bottom line: Almost nothing has changed in the decade since then.
No comments:
Post a Comment