By Jim
Geraghty
Tuesday,
January 17, 2023
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.”
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