On the menu today: The attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, warn that the world is facing a “polycrisis” — multiple multinational crises that are interconnected and exacerbate each other. Boy, that grim assessment makes it sound like the world’s most powerful and influential people are doing a really lousy job, huh? I just hope the Davos crowd can find those powerful, influential, wealthy elites who are failing in leadership. Meanwhile, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and current representative Jim Banks eye the same GOP Senate nomination.
Why Does the Davos Crowd Always Act Like You’re the Biggest Problem on Earth?
As the world’s political, business, and cultural elites gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the organizers of the conference warn that “a ‘polycrisis’ dominated by the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis and political instability is threatening to reverse hard-fought gains in development and growth.”
Runaway inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a global recession, a global food shortage, and climate change — hmmm, you might even call that series of simultaneous interlocking global crises “five gathering storms.”
I suspect that among many conservatives the reflexive response to the Davos conference is disdain, and there’s no getting around the fact that our world’s elites have earned their share of contempt. It’s not merely envy of their wealth and power, because the world will always have those who are richer and more influential than others. No, it’s more that so many Davos attendees arrive with an ambitious plan to save the world, and that plan to save the world usually involves making the rest of us change to fit their visions.
From whom are the Davos attendees trying to save the world? Whoever it is, it sure isn’t China. Chinese vice premier Liu He addressed the attendees this morning, telling them that his country is recovering well from Covid-19 — insert skeptical grunt here — and using the phrases “strengthening international cooperation” and “maintaining world peace” eleven times.
Hey, the Davos organizers aren’t going to let a little thing like the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs get in the way of having the Chinese government represented. If you want a laugh, read World Economic Forum official Paul Smyke trying to explain to the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe why the Russian government is beyond the pale for this year’s conference but the Chinese government isn’t. “One person’s definition of a bad guy is another person’s definition of a good guy. So, I’m not describing any nation that way. I’m just saying that, depending on what your perspective is, you can agree and disagree with how another country, what its policies are, and so on. It’s a fine line.”
Yes, every villain is a hero in the eyes of somebody, but the lesson from that is not that the world doesn’t have any villains. In fact, today’s hero can turn into Davos’s persona non grata tomorrow. Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post recalls how “in 2013, WEF organizers hailed the participation of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as a national leader who understood ‘global responsibilities.’” About a year later, Russian military forces rolled into Crimea and seized it from Ukraine. If globalization encourages leaders to see every head of state as a potential trade partner, it likely dulls their instincts for recognizing threats.
No, in many cases, instead of sounding the alarm about China or Russia endangering the rest of the world, Davos attendees seem a lot more riled up about you, your sport-utility vehicle, your house, your diet (specifically the meat you consume), your political views, and your doubt that globalization has turned out to be that win-win that Davos insists it is.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty vividly imagined last year,
for the Davoisie, the future is your guts wirelessly reporting you truant and then a text message buzzing on every device in the house, warning your pets to exit the room while it is flooded with gas to sedate you into compliance with Pfizer. Afterwards a Chinese multinational informs you that the gas-flooding and Pfizer SWAT-team incident have brought about serious penalties to your carbon score, thereby deferring your long-awaited meat ration by several more years. As a help in the future, Microsoft’s cognitive copilot will be taking over even more duties and tasks previously assigned to you.
The leaders at Davos often offer some version of a pledge, “We’re going to make your life better,” and yet their proposals usually end with your being asked or required to give up something. Infamously, back in 2016, the World Economic Forum Agenda website featured an opinion piece by Ida Auken, a member of the Danish parliament, under the headline, “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.”
A lot of people on social media have contended that Auken’s vision of the future is a formal goal of the World Economic Forum, while a lot of fact-checkers have dunked on those contentions, claiming it’s disinformation. The truth is somewhere in between: Davos never formally endorsed it, but Auken’s vision wasn’t greeted with wholesale rejection or derision, either. The WEF eventually took her article down, but it’s worth reexamining as we advance into the post-pandemic world of ride-sharing, shared office space, pop-up restaurants and retail establishments, etc.
I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much. . . .
In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there. . . .
Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy — the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.
Maybe some people find that vision delightful. Most of us would find it a frustrating nightmare. You don’t own clothes? You share them with other people? All of them? Even the underwear?
Who the heck wants strangers holding business meetings in their living room when they’re out of the house? Who wants to wait for kitchen equipment to be delivered so they can start cooking? Is cupboard overcrowding really that much of a global problem, or is this an urban European apartment-dweller thing? (Apparently where you keep your toaster is a heated topic of debate over on the NRPlus Facebook page.)
Auken writes, “When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people.” And yet, in just about every country and community, you can see how a lack of work and idleness can bring out the worst in people. Many, many people need work to feel productive, consequential, and responsible.
The Auken vision is like life in a college dorm or group house, with no boundaries — and our real-life experience demonstrates that when something is shared by everyone, it usually gets ruined by the worst-behaved among us.
Interestingly, Auken felt a need to add a clarification after the piece was published: “Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading — for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development.”
Okay, here’s my contribution to the discussion: As Charlie Cooke said of the gas-stove banners, bugger off. Very few of us see owning our own homes, owning our own cars, and owning our own clothes as a major problem to be solved, the sort of crisis that requires Danish legislators and global business elites to gather and come up with a plan to rescue us. Nobody asked you to do this, global elites: The world has a giant pile of real problems, so why are you trying to save us from owning stuff? And hey, have you noticed that everybody who attends Davos owns a lot of stuff? I don’t see any Davos attendees giving up their homes, luxury cars, or private jets, or swapping underwear.
Where do the biggest problems in the world come from?
Your mileage may vary, but I would nominate these for the top ten: the mind of Vladimir Putin; the territorial ambitions of the Chinese military; the Wuhan Institute of Virology — or wherever Covid-19 originated; the labs and offices of the technological tinkerers who keep trying to make apps like Tik-Tok even more addictive to vulnerable and impressionable young people; the schools near and far that fail to give young people the education they need to succeed in the world; the busybodies who tie up businesses in knots in an attempt to make them serve an ideological agenda; drug cartels and smugglers; human traffickers; and Islamist terrorists, who are still bombing churches, stabbing cops, and trying to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, even if they don’t generate the headlines they used to get.
And if you want an eleventh to focus on climate change, we can throw in China Energy Investment, which is the driving force behind China’s expanding use of coal.
(Oh, wait, China Energy Investment is a cosponsor of the World Economic Forum.)
You want to solve problems, Davos crowd? Go focus on those.
Oh, and one other detail at Davos that shouldn’t be overlooked: President Joe Biden is about to set off a trade war with our European partners, many of whom are members of the NATO alliance he pledged to strengthen. The BBC notices:
The big shadow here is the threat of a transatlantic green trade war. Joe Biden’s new legislation to boost America’s green economy includes £300bn of subsidies [actually $367 billion] for the purchase of electric cars, but only if they are mainly manufactured in North America. The Inflation Reduction Act also affects a swathe of other manufacturing and production and is persuading some European companies to relocate factories to the US. Even fertiliser companies are having their heads turned and wondering why European leaders aren’t bringing in similar laws.
The US suggests its new legislation is aimed at competing with China. But EU leaders are furious and about to respond, potentially with significant subsidies of their own, presumably also containing “Buy European” clauses.
Elsewhere today, Axios writes, “quips about taking private planes to a ski resort to lament climate change have become an annual tradition.” Er, yes, but it’s not like the critics of Davos made that up or exaggerate the reality. The need to reduce carbon emissions is, year in, year out, one of the biggest themes and messages of the Davos conference, while the attendees rank among the individuals with the highest carbon footprints on earth. Last year the attendees used roughly 1,000 private jets, and “researchers found that all private jet flights to and from airports serving Davos during the World Economic Forum 2022 caused a total of 9,700 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the emissions of about 350,000 average cars in a week.”
ADDENDUM: I’m a fan of Mitch Daniels, but I’m open to the argument that, considering he’s 73 years old, Indiana would be better represented by a fresher face in the Senate. I just don’t like the Club for Growth’s mischaracterization of Daniels as some sort of big-government squish, and not giving him credit for the good work he did at Purdue University. Our Jack Butler makes the case for Daniels, while our Nate Hochman talked to Representative Jim Banks, who declared his bid for the seat this morning. A key portion of Hochman’s interview:
When asked about Daniels himself, Banks — whom Daniels once described as “the future of the Republican Party” — is cautious. “There are a number of differences between us, but I respect him — and I called him this week to let him know I was running and to tell him I respect him,” he told me. But “this isn’t a normal America” anymore, he added: When “the Biden administration is pushing reforms to Title IX that would allow for biological boys to compete against my three young daughters in sports,” the “top leaders in our military are pushing critical race theory and anti-Americanism on our troops,” and “critical race theory in our schools is telling our kids that America is inherently racist and evil, it’s not sustainable.” And it “just, to me, underscores how important these social-conservative issues are.”
I suspect “this isn’t normal America anymore” is going to be a resonant theme in 2023 and 2024.