There’s just something about corporate chieftains meeting at a ski resort to save the world that seems to get people’s backs up.
It could be the jargon – among the buzzwords at last year’s Davos conference was “mattering”, which I’m afraid is a noun. Or it could be the confident attitude of some of the delegates. “It’s pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives, are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet … it’s so, almost extraterrestrial, to think about,” the former US secretary of state John Kerry told the conference last year.
In any case, critics often struggle to buy the idea that climate change can be best solved by the owners of private jets, poverty by the beneficiaries of corporate tax loopholes, and gender equality by a gathering still dominated by men. In fact, the World Economic Forum – among its mission statements is “improving the state of the world” – has long been a byword for hypocrisy and empty virtue signalling: a place where the rich can flatter themselves they are making a difference. “I have a feeling,” the American author Anand Giridharadas has written, “that girls in Africa are tired of being empowered by men in Davos”.
This consensus – at least among progressive types – has been comfortably established, so it’s unsettling to feel it may be shifting. This year Davos found some unlikely champions. A YouGov and Salesforce survey revealed generation Z to be in favour of the conference. About 60% of those polled were “hopeful” about its ability to make the world a better place, when it comes to issues such as climate change.
What has made young people suddenly develop faith in posturing business leaders? Or is it that they’ll now take hope where they can get it? I wonder if this hint that opinion may be changing is tracking another shift. Until about a decade ago it was taken for granted that Davos’s values – globalism, progressivism, decarbonisation – were shared by much of the western world. But they are going out of fashion. To the generation that came of age in the era of populist nationalism, a burgeoning anti-green agenda and with Trump as US president, the Davos agenda, even when mouthed by an out-of-touch elite, may strike some as oddly refreshing.
After all, the forums in which these sorts of ideas are welcome are shrinking. Certainly, the scepticism about Davos on the right has spread. Last week the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, launched a blistering attack on the progressive assumptions that underlie the conference, with a speech that condemned social justice “and parasites who live off the state”. “International organisations”, he said, had been infected with “collectivism”, “radical feminism” and a “cruel … environmental agenda”. Rishi Sunak, at present trying to style himself as a nationalist, shunned the event, as did business figures on the right such as Elon Musk, who preferred to mock it from the sidelines.
There are of course better ways to improve the state of the world than a cosmocrat corporate event. But gen Z may be on to something – perhaps after all you can defend Davos from a progressive standpoint. Leftwing objections to Davos and its pretensions to solve world poverty and climate destruction are made not on the basis of the values themselves but on the idea that they are pursued ineffectively, and by the wrong sort of people. Really, progressives have two complaints: that the conference is useless, and that it is hypocritical. Let’s take these in turn.
First, it’s not true that Davos does no good at all – particularly when it comes, for example, to high-stakes diplomacy. It was at Davos that representatives of East and West Germany met to discuss reunification, and where Nelson Mandela and the then South African president, FW de Klerk, made their first joint appearance together on the international stage – an arguably important step towards ending apartheid. It was at Davos that Bill and Melinda Gates pledged $100m to tackle Aids, where Nicolas Negroponte launched his “one laptop per child campaign”, and from Davos that the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization was launched, an enterprise that has helped vaccinate 760 million children. It’s not enough, but there is pressure to do better, and often from inside the conference itself.
More could be done, of course. But the real criticism of Davos – what seems most to stick in the throat of critics – is the hypocrisy of the thing: that globetrotting millionaires have the audacity, despite various corporate sins, to want to dabble in high-profile philanthropy and woke ideas. This comes from the same quarters, I think, as critics of “woke capitalism”. How dare these people, whom we hold to be bad, try to associate themselves with views we hold to be good? They must be forced to preach what they practice, the better to make a contrast with our own righteousness.
This seems to me an unhelpful sort of moral purism. If Davos were shut down tomorrow, would its various “thought leaders” go home and pour their energies into private good works – paying more taxes, swearing off private jets, donating to charity? I doubt it. It is irritating to watch someone virtue signal, but the upside is that this can occasionally result in virtuous acts. The social pressure created by Davos, annoying as it is, can be a force for good.
There’s an argument against this, which is that by mouthing pieties at Davos, amoral capitalists can cover their arses. On the contrary, I think it lays them open to attack. Hypocrites, with their anxious need to please the crowd, are far easier to skewer than balls-out defenders of the status quo. Davos is the best platform from which to make a speech calling out billionaires for tax avoidance – the historian Rutger Bregman went viral for doing so in 2019. Oxfam’s report on economic inequality is released to coincide with Davos – and that context helps it dominate headlines. And this year, more than 250 millionaires and billionaires sent an open letter to political leaders at Davos, asking them to please tax them more. Social pressure from peers is a powerful force. Sometimes it can be a force for good.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
