TIME EUROPE
WEB EXCLUSIVE
A Class Act
The high-minded--and gracious--WEF fights complacency
By DON MORRISON
Day two of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, and there is not a hotel room to be found in this Swiss mountain town. I had originally been told there were about 3,000 people at the conference. But today's inaugural speeches and panel discussions were filled to overflowing. I was turned away from several because I made the mistake of showing up on time, rather than early. A knowledgeable insider said the crowd is closer to 5,000. The Davos Congress Center has been reconfigured this year to make more space, but the crush of eager participants and their expensively dressed spouses is overwhelming.
A word about spouses. The WEF, with admirable graciousness, treats them -- male and female -- as full participants, with access to all sessions and the right to stand up and say what they want. Indeed, spouses are often the most interesting, down-to-earth people in the hall -- they, at least, know the price of milk in the supermarket, deal with tradesmen and retailers, read books and worry about what their children see on the Internet, while their more prominent partners are busy making fortunes and saving the world.
And saving the world is what this undertaking is all about. A note of high earnestness hangs over the meeting, as it has for decades, Consider the opening remarks of WEF founder and president Klaus Schwab. "We are entering this new age with a lot of unfinished business left over from the 20th century," he declared. "The problem of poverty has not been resolved. Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pollution, corruption, etc. must still figure on our agenda." As an aside, he noted that the meeting would be "carbon neutral," in that the carbon emissions it produced would be offset by the planting of thousands of trees in Mexico under the auspices of two environmental organizations. He then announced that he personally will award a $1 million annual prize for "entrepreneurial achievements" in the fields of social, human and sustainable development, though details of those categories have yet to be worked out. The motto of this year's meeting "is fighting complacency," he said, and "the criterion for success is our capability to make a difference and living up to our mission of improving the state of the world."
Those high-minded sentiments were reflected in the panel discussion that followed. Author Umberto Eco, economist Paul Krugman, Islamic scholar Sayyed Hossein Nasr, environmentalist Molly Harriss Olsen and Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister George Yeo were asked what they considered to be the biggest challenges facing the world. Their suggestions were condensed into a list of ten. And then, in an exercise never before attempted at the conference (or anywhere I've been), all 1,000 or so people in the audience were asked indicate which concerns they thought were the most pressing. They used hand-held devices that transmitted their selections wirelessly to a computer. The results: "climate change," basically global warming, came in first, with 20.3% of the vote. Second was "the end of traditional ethics," Eco's lament that the amount of respect and success accorded a person is no longer linked with virtue, with 15.7%. Third was "ineffective international systems," a reference to the seeming inability of global entities like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the entire international community to do anything constructive these days, with 15.1%.
Credit must go to Schwab for focusing the attention of a crowd dominated by wealthy, successful people on their social responsibilities - especially at a time when global stock markets are booming, the Asian financial crisis (a preoccupation of last year's session) is waning and the developed world is awash in prosperity. Alas, Schwab was unable to bask in such credit. He woke up this morning to find a front-page article in the European Wall Street Journal accusing him of conflicts of interest: he has personal investments in several small companies that have received contracts from the WEF, and one of those companies has evidently given him stock options. A few days earlier, the Washington Post published a piece noting that executives of big corporate contributors to the non-profit WEF are routinely given prominent places in the meeting's program.
European attendees sniffed that such lapses are business as usual on the Continent, and that only righteous Anglo-Saxons and the news media might make a big deal of them. I would suggest another factor: the sheer success of the WEF. A organization that can get 3,000 (or is it 5,000?) people to come to this cold, remote, not entirely hospitable spot at their own expense is a fat target for the jealous and the cynical. But there's a word for an outfit that isn't ashamed about exhorting these mostly well-off attendees to forget about their booming economies and focus on what still needs to be done in less fortunate places. It's the same one that describes treating an accompanying spouse as someone who deserves to be heard. The word is classy.
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