MORE than a thousand private jets will set down in the tiny Swiss ski resort of Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, an annual pilgrimage for the high net worth junta and their intellectual clerics. Guest of honour Donald Trump will make his closing remarks to this shadowy assembly of international bankers, Bilderbergers and citizens of nowhere, having won the presidency on the back of a toxic alliance with border-closing nationalists and braindead conspiracy theorists. The apparent hypocrisy shouldn’t surprise us. After all, these are his people. This is his real heartland.
“Davos Man”, in Samuel P Huntington’s view, refers to those rich people who have “little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. Notably, Davos Man also remains a man, on average at least, since men make up about 80 per cent of delegates. Feminism has barely dented the boardroom: indeed, in Britain, the gender pay gap for those earning above £100,000 has grown by 23 per cent in the past five years.
Traditionally, at Davos, the waiters outnumber the women. This year, in a nod to new norms, the forum will feature all-female co-chairs. The forum has also released a report warning that technological change is likely to make the gender pay gap worse. It all sounds fairly right on. But don’t be fooled: Davos remains more bloke than woke, and Donald Trump certainly won’t have any trouble fitting in.
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Davos Man felt panicked by 2016, but 2017 was good to him. According to Oxfam, 82 per cent of money generated last year went to the richest one per cent. That group now has more wealth than the rest of the planet combined. Billionaires exist in record numbers, and with growing clout. Just five men own the same wealth as half the world’s population. Even better, from their perspective, they don’t even have to work hard for it. About two-thirds of billionaire wealth comes from inheritance, monopoly and cronyism by Oxfam’s account.
With the world economy growing, the threat of populist protest has receded. Trump has been brought into the club, and there is now less risk of Brexit sparking a mass break-up of the international institutions that shield wealth and power from democracy. From the summit of Davos, which is, both literally and figuratively, Europe’s highest town, the situation is calm. For now.
But Davos is about long-term thinking, and while the forum’s intellectual contributions range from jaw-dropping complacency to butt-clenching smarminess, they cannot be accused of ignoring the world’s problems. The conference will hear contributions on any number of global crises, from refugees and water shortages to populism and automation.
If Davos has a function, it is taking these global problems and sanitising them into new forms of harmless consumerism. Climate change? Let’s encourage shoppers to buy green and recycle. Global terrorism and extremist ideology? No problem: let’s shove a McDonald’s in downtown Baghdad. Automation? We’ll get workers to retrain as entrepreneurs – in their own time, of course. A growing gender pay gap? Easily fixed: women just need to “lean in”, like men.
All this elite voluntarism would be amusing if it didn’t exercise such a profound influence on democratic life. These “ideas” have dominated our parliaments for decades. Even in everyday situations, I still meet grown adults who ask why the unemployed don’t just move town and why the poor don’t just apply for better jobs and why, if there’s such a problem with greenhouse gases, we don’t just pump “good gases” into the sky.
Still, despite their ideological and financial success, the Davos men aren’t sleeping easy. They are warning that the current spell of good economic weather will be short-lived, and that a new crisis is coming. Davos will also hear contributions about inequality. Here, they must play a dangerous game. On the one hand, they know they must act concerned. They know, also, that a combination of inequality and bad economic times will almost certainly breed new populist reactions of whatever ideological colour, reactions that could disrupt the global order that keeps their capital growing.
They know, in other words, that their elaborate wealth and power is one of the prime causes of the ongoing crisis of liberal capitalist democracy. And they know that any attempt to fix this will bring unwanted intrusion into their privileged lifestyles and market freedoms.
The capitalism we’ve grown up with, the capitalism that made Davos Man so powerful, will never offer workable solutions to the problems discussed at this Forum. To be honest, no kind of capitalism can. Every year that passes without major challenges to the system is another wasted opportunity. Sooner or later, we must reckon with Davos Man and the system that makes him wealthier again every time he passes go.
In my view, Davos Man already knows this. The Forum exists, in part, for our benefit, to offer reassurance to politicians, pundits and punters that the men who run the world are working on solutions to all the problems. But, contrary to the conspiracy theorists, forums like Davos don’t make decisions; they achieve zero but back-slapping and pandering. After the rhetoric is done, look behind the scenes in the resort’s hotels and bars, and you’ll see Davos Man doubled over with laughter at our expense.
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