TIME EUROPE
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Hail the New Economy
Participants at the WEF are rallying behind the global revolution, but dissent is on the way
By DON MORRISON
Day three of the World Economic Forum's 30th annual meeting dawns bright and cheery, with a lemony sun rising over snow-blanketed mountains in an impossibly blue sky. For the 3,000 (or is it 5,000?) participants at this high-priced gabfest, life doesn't get any better than this. The Dôle wine and Calanda beer flow like water, and the veal melts in your mouth. The Asian economic crisis is but a memory, we are told by various panelists, and how about those latest U.S. growth figures? The U.S. is an unpredictable hyper-power, the European policy experts lament, but with the proper cajoling and enough conferences like this one, America can be taught to behave. The revolution in bio-genetics promises victories against hunger, disease, even aging--if managed well by intelligent people like those gathered here. The new era of digital convergence will bring unimagined opportunities for spreading knowledge and wealth. The seemingly unstoppable, technology-driven New Economy will deliver us from evil, amen.
And yet. The euro yesterday hit an all-time low of 97.74 to the U.S. dollar. The Dow Jones Industrials, anticipating a Federal Reserve interest-rate hike on Feb. 2, plunged 289 points, or nearly 3%. Amazon.com, that New Economy darling, announced it would lay off 150 workers, while Old Economy stalwart Lockheed will shed 2,800. British Prime Minister Tony Blair exhorted the crowd here to adopt the free-market policies of his and Bill Clinton's governments. But Blair also warned against a technology-driven stock market bubble. Meanwhile, in the conference halls and hotel dining rooms of Davos, the assault on globalization continues. "Seattle was just the beginning," U.S. labor leader John Sweeny told a group of journalists, summoning up the anti-globalization melee at last year's World Trade Organization meeting. "If globalization brings more inequality, then it will generate a violent reaction that will make Seattle look tame."
As I write these words, a bus load of demonstrators is wending its way up the valley from Zurich. They may be turned back by police and army checkpoints. But if they or others get through and carry out their plans to create a stir, Davos could take its place alongside Seattle as a buzz word for something new and ugly on the global scene: the rejection by much of the world of everything the World Economic Forum stands for, including the optimism that nearly a decade of economic growth and technological frenzy have merited. At the Congress Center, participants are lingering in front of the many Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Reuters screens, squinting in incomprehension at the graphs of currencies and stocks that point mostly downward. Outside my hotel room window, a thin layer of clouds has stolen over the valley, diffusing the light and making it difficult to see where the sun really is. God is usually subtler in Her metaphors.
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