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Davos Dispatch

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from: Robert Wright

Posted Friday, Jan. 26, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

I'm Here!

I want you to know that I am not the kind of guy who would be in a place like this. This place is Davos, Switzerland, where every year the World Economic Forum draws the densest concentration of alpha males (and, increasingly, alpha females) on the planet. Many are rich—a lot of CEOs—and many of the ones who aren't rich are powerful: prime ministers, finance ministers, and so on. And then there is a miscellaneous category into which I fall—and even here, I maintain, I am an anomaly: not an internationally recognized visionary (e.g., John Seely Brown of Xerox), not a nationally known media personage (Charlie Rose), and lacking the networking skills that everyone else in the "Executive Lounge" seems to be employing while I sit here alone typing.

So why did I come? The editor of this journal, Mike Kinsley, says that people come to Davos so that everyone will know they were invited. (He was invited and declined, a fact he was willing to share with me.) Actually, though, there are other payoffs for the average Davos goer. There's the networking. There's the fact that some of the panel discussions actually are enlightening. (I just sat in on one and heard that someday husbands will have machines that sniff department-store perfumes and decide which ones their wives would like. OK, bad example.) Still, as usual, Kinsley is probably onto something: Part of the point of coming here is to have come here. I want you to know that I'm not the kind of guy who would be here, and I want you to know that I'm here.

I also want you to know I've been here once before, in 1995. But this year's meeting has something that that one lacked: the thrilling prospect of anarchy. The Seattle protesters—I'm using that term generically—have targeted Davos for disruption. Big-time disruption, apparently: As I was boarding the plane last night, I heard that the State Department had issued a travel advisory, warning Americans against coming here. And the Swiss police, on roads that lead to Davos, have set up checkpoints where they selectively ask drivers to pull over for further examination. (Radical profiling, you might call it.)

As recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, the World Economic Forum may have taken a bit of wind out of the protesters' sails by bringing some of their heroes into its tent. Though once known (with some exaggeration) as an annual celebration of globalization, Davos increasingly includes speakers who are skeptical of globalization, to say the least. This year's panels feature such characters as Jeremy Rifkin, the famous Cassandra, and Naderite flamethrower Lori ("WTO—fix it or nix it") Wallach. At least, the panels are supposed to include them. There have been reports that some lefty invitees may decide at the last minute to stay home in a show of solidarity with the protesters—or to protest the police's thwarting of the protesters.

That would be a shame. As anyone who regularly reads my stuff knows, I think globalization, and its budding institutions of governance, such as the WTO, are basically good even in their present form. But I also think the natural course of events will tend to steer such institutions leftward, as the voices of environmentalists, labor unions, and other leftish groups are heard. My hopeful scenario for the future is that—metaphorically speaking, at least—those scruffy Seattle protesters will put on suits and ties and become lefty lobbyists, exerting influence on supranational institutions. But in the back of my mind is the fear that lefties will boycott global governance indefinitely—that, as they say in Congress when someone votes for a bill while hoping it won't pass, the left would "rather have the issue."

Though I profess to find Davos in some ways alienating—I'm pretty sure that in 1995 I left here with a lower serotonin level than I'd come with—I do think that it, too, is a basically good thing. One of my hobbyhorse themes, after all, is that economic integration makes war among nations less likely. If that's true, then Davos' broadly transnational mingling of financial and political elites—and they truly do come from all continents—is an antiwar activity.

Still, Davos would be an even better thing if the left used it to start seriously influencing the dialogue about globalization, rather than just complain. Stay tuned. The week is young.

dispatches
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from: Robert Wright

Posted Friday, Jan. 26, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
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Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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CEOs to the cameras for phony Q&As, everyone knows the Swiss thing is cheesy old PR. Not one Davos attendee last year told us that the technology stock market was a fraud: not one told us that bankruptcy was a vital contemporary financial tool. Tell us about the hookers, the champagne parties, the guys who get stoned, the pr phonies from the American media who hype the thing. The Swiss tourist crowd sells a few thousand hotel rooms in the worst month of the year--what else is there?



--Nannygoat



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