The best-written (and funniest) account of Davos I have ever read, all the more remarkable in coming from a first-timer: Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker. This really is it.
He is right about Klaus Schwab’s “dogged sincerity”, which doesn’t change with the years. “Professor Schwab says that he doesn’t go to any of the private parties. ‘We do not welcome them,’ he told me. ‘They detract from what we are doing. Many people come to Davos to exploit the presence of so many top-level people. They organize shadow programs.’ [...] ‘People know that I am very much against caviar and champagne and expensive wines, which are out of character with the atmosphere of a mountain village.’”
That battle was lost long ago: I dated the final capitulation to 2003.
“[Gunnar Jauch] showed me a cartoon that encapsulated his feeling about the W.E.F. annual meeting. It depicts a woman in a fur coat walking into the Congress Center and saying to her companion, ‘There are so many sessions, I can’t decide between “hunger” and “poverty.”’”
March 2 2012 at 4:58 am
That aimless session with Chelsea Clinton described near the end is staggeringly familiar. There are always a few like it: good people, but no originality or thread of any kind running through the discussion.
The article has been called merely negative. I hope it is not that.