What’s the point of Davos when even the rich are fed up with the super-rich? | Zoe Williams
RAchilles Reeves may give the impression of being someone who’s never late to social events, but she’s increasingly late to the party. At a breakfast on the second day of Davos, after making clear her belief in artificial intelligence and a highly skilled workforce, someone asked the British Chancellor how she felt about “wealth creation” – was she? Relaxed in the Blairian sense? “Sure,” Reeves replied. “Quite relaxed.”
Creating wealth is not quite the same wealthBut it is known that “wealth creators” are called “wealth creators”. Super rich Use them for themselves. Hence Reeves’ very relaxed tone here puts her in the minority – perhaps a minority of one. As Elon Musk revives his path to political power, Not even the rich They’re relaxed about wealth anymore. On the first day of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the pro-tax campaign group Patriotic Millionaires Survey results released Among 2,000 high-net-worth individuals in the G20: More than half believed that extreme wealth poses a threat to democracy, and more than two-thirds agreed that the visible influence of the wealthy leads to declining trust in the media, the justice system and democracy.
Even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaking the same day in Davos, seemed to realize that the neoliberal dream that the interests of the wealthy were perfectly aligned with the interests of everyone else was over. She stated this publicly “The cooperative global system that we imagined 25 years ago has not become a reality. Instead, we have entered a new era of harsh geostrategic competition. She did not mention Donald Trump by name, but that was not a secret.
No one in Davos feels comfortable; Not about wealth or anything. No one, that is, except Rachel Reeves.
Davos itself is home to the show’s version of high-net-worth individuals, where you get close enough to almost touch them, and everyone can hear what they’re really thinking. In fact, wealthy people rarely appear in paintings, and when they do, they always talk about philanthropy. Instead, you’re supposed to see academics, CEOs, and high-level government ministers speaking on panels, simply deducing what the wealthy are thinking.
In recent years, it has not been unusual for those discussions to be quite stark. In 2023, for example, speakers at one session went on to explain the rationale for the proposition that we are at the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Bay of Pigs. Climate change was a regular topic, and there was always at least one realist in the room. In short, you were allowed to go to Davos and worry about the end of the world. You’ll be in good company, and no one will be a fool (otherwise how would they be rich?).
But these pessimistic scenarios were just to make you listen to the solution, which is – great news, people, because there are more of them every year – very rich people. They were all looking forward to a future in which the climate emergency and hunger are solved by technology, and everyone works smartly to maximize their human potential. This was always a misdirection: it relied on us, the observing public, to be unable to distinguish between the rich and the super-rich. If you think a billionaire is the same as a millionaire, you miss how much wealth they accumulate, and you probably don’t think about how socially destabilizing that can be.. Once you exclude them, their dreams, values, interests and goals seem similar, when they are not similar at all. In a way, the entire corporate and tech conference circuit has been an exercise in camouflaging the rich among the rich, in a cloak of invisibility.
Often, the only way you knew the billionaires were millionaires in Davos was because, strolling among the snowshoes and sneakers, there were men in clean clothes., Great suits. This was because they were dropped at the front door of the event in a helicopter or snowmobile, while everyone else had to walk through the snow. Probably the most important thing you can do in Davos is walk around in your underwear, and I’m sure one day one of the tech bros will do that.
Or at least, I was sure that Davos was no longer necessary for his tech brethren, because they no longer needed this camouflage. Billionaires no longer pretend to have pro-social motives. At the top of the tree, they took over the most powerful country in the world (Musk); They fire fact-checkers (Mark Zuckerberg); Or they are accused of muzzling parts of the free press they own (Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong); So the last thing they need is a cadre of ventriloquist dummies to convince the world that they hold the values they have abandoned, building a brand of yesterday’s model.
Davos, whose goal was nothing more than to sell the massive concentration of wealth among a small segment of humanity as a public good, is now obsolete. In an Escher-esque fantasy woven by expense accounts and group delusion, he manages to be the party and be late to the party. Even Rachel Reeves was late to that.
