Davos Newbies

Rebellion

Today’s hot ticket was the high noon session on paradigms for the future. Shimon Peres, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sam Huntingdon, Francis Fukuyama and Hillary Clinton were a panel of real intellectual depth and interest.

Unfortunately, moderator Tim Sebastian showed how the role can be used for ill as well as good. Sebastian runs an interview programme on BBC World which is generally pretty good. But his pugnacious one-on-one style translated badly. Worse, he spent the first 25 minutes of the session pursuing specific questions about the Israel-Palestine problem.

When it got to Sam Huntingdon, he said he thought he’d been asked to speak about new paradigms. Then senator Clinton chipped in to say she’d like to hear what the other speakers had to say about broader trends. Widespread applause from a full house of participants nearing rebellion.

The session got back on the track it should have been on from the beginning, but the sour taste of the first part was never fully erased.

Much of the discussion focused on the growing economic and technological disparities in the world and how to remedy them. “We need a global society, not merely a global economy,” said Soros. I was impressed by Fukuyama and Brzezinski in particular. “If it were poverty that shapes terrorism,” said Fukuyama, “all the terrorists would be coming from sub-Saharan Africa. We need to consider the role religion and culture is playing in shaping the development of the world.”

Bulls and bears

The New York Stock Exchange threw a pretty good party for the Forum on
Saturday night. To get there, our buses had a police escort, and roads were
closed off to speed our journey. I suspect it’s the only time the vast
majority of us will have Manhattan traffic stayed for our progress.

The stock exchange trading floor had been transformed into a series of
spaces — salsa, Asian, Moroccan, African — with music and food to match.
The boardroom on the sixth floor was for classical music, while the seventh
floor was rock and roll (and far and away the most popular).

For me, the boardroom was evocative of an era when JP Morgan and cronies
would have sat around the table in the vast, Corinthian pilastered room (it
had to be Corinthian), cigar smoke floating up to the high, ornate ceiling,
plotting some market coup.

A friend said, “How many poor people do you think have been screwed in
this room?”