Davos and the flatearthers (or "Why Populism is Winning")

In 2005 Thomas Freidman said that the "World is Flat" where he argued that globalisation (or Globalisation 3.0 - the digital revolution) equalised the opportunities between different places:

“Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.”

There's a lot of truth in Friedman's contention (and in his observation elsewhere that communism is the best system for making people equally poor whereas capitalism has made people unequally rich) but there's a problem - flatearthers are a minority. Not just a minority in developing countries in Asia and Africa but a minority in rich countries too. In a book at least partly in response to Freidman, Dutch geographer, Harm de Blij made the case that location still matters and that the world divided into a core and a periphery with the core - big cities, expensive suburbs, grand university towns - inhabited by flatearthers.

The annual World Economic Forum shindig at Davos is, to use de Blij's argument, the time when those flat earthers are most evident to those on the periphery (and remember that a trainee hairdresser in Barnsley is as much on that periphery - at least psychologically - as the subsistence farmer in Tanzania or the kid in Sao Paolo's slums). The blanket media coverage of the shiny beautiful people in that expensive Swiss ski resort allows us to press our noses up against the glass of the flatearther bubble, to peek inside their splendid world.

The problem is that something has changed in how we see these splendid people. Before we were slightly envious of their jet-setting lives and were engaged with the fawning attention given to flatearthers by the media (whose top folk are, of course, all fully part of the flat earth life). Now many people can't see beyond the irony of wealthy and powerful people sitting in an exclusive resort to, they tell us, discuss the challenges facing the world including how they can help the majority of the world who aren't part of their flat earth. This loss of reverence for the rich and powerful (even when it throws up ghastly leaders like Donald Trump) is, I suspect, one of the driving forces behind what those flatearthers have chosen to call "populism".

Where once people saw important and intelligent people brainstorming solutions to the world's problems, they now see instead rich and powerful people doing deals. Davos seems to be about who gets the grand jobs in UN agencies, international NGOs and big business, more to do with politicians handing out favours in return for future riches, and the opportunity for those in charge of economies to close doors for those people outside the flatearther bubble. We see a line of fifty private jets parked at Davos's nearest airport and then wonder at the chutzpah of those jets' owners sitting down to talk about climate change (including taxes on air tickets, petrol and other stuff that ordinary people rely on for their mundane lives).

The problem is that the reaction to the preening arrogance of Davos is now to reject globalisation, to engage with the sort of anti-trade, anti-migrant agenda that we see from Trump. Some see this agenda as deflection - "we're doing something but not so much that it damages our shiny world" - but whether or not this is the case, the policies being promoted are popular. What too few people are doing is making a different populist case, one that says international trade, globalisation and migration are good things but that the technocratic mindset of Davos reinforces the myth that these things are somehow the gifts of powerful people who control government.

I commented on Twitter that Davos is the Oscars for crony capitalists - it's all about the fix, about a get-around for the problems of democracy. This is the world of David Cameron's 'Global Race' where business, media, entertainment and philanthropy mix and plan (without having to bother with those pesky voters) how the world will be better. Plus of course who gets the big contracts, the cushy jobs and the consultancy on whatever boondoggles are proposed.

None of this is to say that the World Economic Forum is a bad idea or that nothing good comes of it but perhaps its organisers need to take a step back and ask whether the impression the event gives is, given those populist pressures, the right one. Perhaps a spoonful or two of humility might help as well as perhaps a less opulent location. Above all we maybe need to drop the hubris, get away from the idea that the grand people gathered in Davos are the only ones wise enough to make the right decisions for the planet. There are over seven billion humans across the world and every single one of them is just as important as the few hundred gathered in that posh Swiss ski resort - if the Davos crowd can't get what that means then the populists will win and the world will be worse for it.

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