Davos Newbies

Ouch, that hurts

“I really dig Hannibal. Hannibal had real guts. He rode elephants into Cartilage.” Mike Tyson quoted by Frank Keating

Opening day details

The Forum has just announced a few of the details for the opening day.

Hamid Karzai, who heads the interim administration in Afghanistan, will speak at the opening plenary. If the impact makes people understand the long-term difficulties that will attend reconstructing his nation, Karzai’s intervention will be welcome. Although the development pledges made last week in Tokyo were a good start, long-term support for the hard slog of nation-building (that verboten phrase in the White House) is not yet assured.

The cultural extravaganza later on Thursday will include: Bono, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Lauryn Hill, Joshua Bell, Branford Marsalis, Arturo Sandoval, Ravi Shankar and Hikaru Utada. I’m not sure how you mix these and others together, but I trust Quincy Jones does know.

What do you expect with an orange badge?

Jenni Russell, editor of BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, kvetches at her treatment in Davos (to understand her riff on badges, look here). She also makes some important points about the Forum’s constricted role. It is a convener, not a decider. It can make grand statements (and it does, often), but it has no way of compelling its business participants to modify their behaviour in any way.

I do think, however, that she underestimates the potential impact of opening minds to other ideas and topics. To my observation, most participants are extraordinarily thirsty to find out in particular about the things of which they know nothing. Jenni’s langlaufing Goldman Sachs man is atypical, and sounds an arrogant sod.

What went wrong

Paul Kennedy’s review of Bernard Lewis’s latest book on Islam and the west contains more wisdom than many screeds in the aftermath of 11 September. According to Lewis, the divide between the two is “one of the greatest cultural and political divides in modern history”. Sorting out Afghanistan and finishing off Qaeda will hardly make a dent in this chasm.

I’ll single out one nugget. “The works of Mozart and Shakespeare and Voltaire have traveled around the globe, as for that matter have Stravinsky, jazz and George Orwell. But they all pretty much stop at the frontiers of the Arab world, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, compose.”

Blocking aid

Because of the obstinance of the US administration, the UN conference on development finance will not be promoting a target of 0.7% of GNP for aid. The current average for developed countries is 0.22%.

According to the UN, rich countries need to double the current $50 billion annual development assistance to reach the 2015 goals of halving the number of people suffering poverty, hunger or lacking access to drinking water; achieving universal primary schooling; vastly reducing maternal and infant mortality rates; and halting the spread of preventable diseases.

These goals seem to me fundamental to our humanity. How sad that the funding is a political issue, rather than a clear responsibility for the rich nations of the world.