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What's Wrong with Davos?

Podcasts Jan 29, 2019 Elmira Bayrasli and Anand Giridharadas

For the past several decades, world leaders, CEOs, tech titans, billionaires, philanthropists, and celebrities have descended upon Davos, Switzerland with the goal of “improving the state of the world.” Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, says they are part of the problem.

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Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, as well as The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. He is an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

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douglas ungredda Jan 29, 2019

Agree 100%. Davos just a showcase of very smart executives who decry world inequality and misery but having some caviar and champagne above the fray. I'd rather dispense from all this pious BS. It just doesn't add value, except for the swissies who can sell their luxury wares.
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Petey Bee Jan 29, 2019

Interesting interview.

On the one hand, attempts to acknowledge the deleterious effects of worsening inequality should be applauded and encouraged.

On the other hand, the Davos speakers whose presence has been widely publicized so far may be making a less-than-ideal impression.

The mere presence of Bolsonaro as keynote speaker is probably the winner. Honorable mention to the head of Morgan Stanley - saying in an interview how Saudi Arabia is now "out of the penalty box", and it's time to "move forward" past the Kashoggi killing. Even the outrage surrounding that crime has a bitter irony to it, since the outrage stood in such stark contrast to the halfhearted denunciations of a vastly greater mass killing and intentional starvation in Yemen.

But lamenting such hypocrisies is a fruitless way to fill a day- it becomes just one cheap shot after another. As Anand Giridharadas says at the end, the power to address the root cause issues - injustice and inequality - lies in the hands of the people. For better, or quite possibly for worse.

In places like Yemen, the agent of change, by most utter and complete default, will continue to be some variety of political Islam. Within the western world, it's looking like the nationalist right, since unlike the progressive left, they seem able to survive pro-business-centrist efforts to water down leftist attempts at egalitarian reform. If there was some way to impress upon Davos attendees that this is an undesirable path (that is, if you spend your efforts coopting the hard-reformist left, you'll put the extreme right in power), then the event would have value after all.
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