Dan Hannan takes aim at Davos:

When it comes to free markets, Davos Man is often on the same side as the Lefties. He derives most of his income, directly or indirectly, from state patronage. If he is in the private sector – and he is more likely to be a lobbyist, politician or bureaucrat than a businessman – he’ll be an instinctive monopolist, keen to persuade ministers and officials to raise barriers against his potential rivals. (I say “he”, though his female equivalent can also be found stalking the conference rooms in her sharp trouser suit.) . . .
Most Right-wingers heartily dislike the Davos racket. The only reason we don’t demonstrate in the slush alongside the Occupy crowd is that most of us have jobs. We know in our bones that Davos Man despises us and our values. As Samuel Huntingdon once put it, the delegates “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 élite’s global operations.”

Hannan points to a number of things that, in his view, “Davos Man” has got wrong, and continues:

A whole academic discipline has grown up to explore why bright, educated people make these errors of judgment. One theory is that, being bright, they over-value their hunches. Put a large group of such people together, so that their hunches become self-reinforcing, and you get the disastrous groupthink to which experts are prone.

What was that someone once said about the smartest guys in the room?

And with the groupthink comes a certain obliviousness.

Bloomberg:

Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune investing in real estate and betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics [BTW he’s quite possibly about that].
“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.” . . .
[Greene] flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week . . .
The billionaire said he’s planning on having dinner tonight with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Of course he was. If anyone is Davos Man, it is Blair, a spinner of soft-left, supranationalist platitudes (in which, to be fair, he has convinced himself he believes), an unctuous grifter of genius who has gamed the system to enormous personal advantage, while ruining just about everything he has touched.

Writing for the BBC meanwhile, Robert Peston notes that some folk were missing from Davos:

It is striking and important that at a time when populist parties pose an arguably existential threat to European Union and eurozone, there is not a single representative of any them at the summit of the Swiss mountain (or at least not that I could spot).
But if Farage, le Pen and Tsipras aren’t here, Davos risks being seen as too removed from the big political and economic debates of our time, or at least those who excite a growing number of citizens.

Well, debate, in any real sense is not what Davos does.

And speaking of Syriza leader Tsipras there’s some, ahem, interesting news from Greece.