The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Davos is back and more relevant than ever

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

It’s the annual event that no major businessman or policy-maker dares to miss. Among the famous attendees of the most recent World Economic Forum in Davos were the CEO’s of Amazon, BlackRock, Pfizer, JPMorgan Chase, the head of the FBI, publisher of The New York Times, and heads of states from all corners of the earth.  This exclusive get together of the world’s elite has a noble mission statement: to improve the state of the world through public-private participation. Critics of the forum, however, argue that the annual event has become a rich person’s playground where out of touch corporate elites meet in private to make important decisions about global policy without scrutiny or consultation. While chief executives meet under the noble pretense of solving poverty and climate change, most attendees use the forum to further their business interests and make themselves richer. Davos’s supporters argue that the annual forum is more important now than ever before. From climate change, to food and energy inflation, to geopolitical instability, the global crises we face require collective action through cooperation and interdependence. Relationships and collaborations forged in Davos have and continue to bring about real world solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. Davos might be elite, its supporters concede, but its also effective in working towards global prosperity and peace. Arguing for the motion is Don Tapscott, CEO of the Tapscott Group and the co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute Arguing against the motion is Peter S. Goodman, the global economic correspondent for The New York Times and the author of DAVOS MAN: How the Billionaires Devoured the World     The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Our goal is to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, Davos is back and more relevant than ever. Snow-covered Alps, private jets, and coveted white badges. The world's elite will descend on Davos for the World Economic Forum's first winter meeting since 2020. The rich and powerful all jetted off. to beautiful Davos, Switzerland this week, for the annual world economic forum. The theme this year is cooperation in a fragmented world.

The war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, inflation, and climate change are all top of the agenda. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, it's one of the most exclusive global events for the world's wealthy and powerful. Attendees at this year's Davos included the likes of the CEO of Amazon, BlackRock, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, and political leaders from across the planet.

Even the head of the FBI was at Davos this year. Go figure. Their mission statement, to improve the state of the world through public-private dialogue. Critics argue that the truth is far more self-serving. While chief executives meet under supposedly noble pretences of solving global poverty or the climate crisis, most attendees, in fact, use the form to further

their business interests to make them and their shareholders richer. Here's climate activist Greta Thurnberg. We are right now in Davos, where the, basically the people who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels, etc., etc. And yet somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems, where they have proven time and time again that they are not prioritizing that. They are prioritizing self-sef greed, corporate greed, and short-term economic profits above people and above planets.

Davis's supporters argue that the annual form is more important than ever. The world is facing a series of challenges, from climate change to inflation to geopolitical instability. These are complicated issues that require cooperation and collaboration. among corporations, governments, NGOs, unions, all the groups represented each and every year at Davos. In this installment of the Monk debates, we're going to go to the heart of this controversy by debating the motion, be it resolved. Davos is back and more relevant than ever. Arguing for the motion is Don Tapscott, the CEO of the Tapscott Group, and the co-founder and executive chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute.

arguing against the motion is Peter S. Goodman, the global economic correspondent for the New York Times, an author of Davos Man, How the Billionaires Devoured the World. Don, you're arguing in favor of the motion. Let me put two minutes on the program clock and turn the show over to you. Well, thanks very much. And yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing what we have to say as well. Let me start by standing back, big picture, what I think this thing represents. And you look around the world today and we have problems. And if the war in Ukraine, pandemic, show us anything, it's that we're interconnected. And the sheer number of global crises today, climate change, the interconnected food and energy crises,

global fragmentation, declining prosperity, many parts of the world, you know, these call for serious big collective action. So global solutions are required for these global problems. But how and by whom? How is that going to happen? Well, the only way that we know how to solve global problems is through nation states. And after the Second World War, the winners got together at Bretton Woods and New Hampshire, and they created the IMF and the World Bank. Then a year later, the UN, then the GAT, the WTO, all these global organizations based on nation states. And they were the only game in town for solving problems. But since Bretton Woods, we've had some big changes. We saw the rise of the civil society. There weren't really NGOs at Bretton Woods because there weren't any. And there were 50 NGOs in the

world. Today, they're what, 10% of the North American economy. And we've also seen the rise of the private sector as viewed as a, you know, quote, pillar of society. So what we've got is these new networks, organizations that involve all three of these pillars. And they're addressing every conceivable issue facing humanity from climate change, poverty, human rights, you name it. And I've attended Davao since the 1990s and I've watched it grow from being a meeting to a, you know, a year-round collaboration that engenders dozens of communities and actually engages tens of thousands of people in researching, discussing, addressing these problems. And many of these people are not captains of industry, they're volunteers like me.

And so I wouldn't say the form is setting an agenda for anything. It has no mandate to do anything. But insofar that we need information, collaboration, and action, bringing these three pillars together, it's a positive thing and it's had good results. I mean, one example of many is that in 2000 it launched a vaccine alliance that by 2017 it's It's saved over three million children's lives in Africa. I mean, that's a positive thing. Thank you, Don.

Great opening statement. Okay, Peter, your opportunity, too. A couple of minutes on the show clock, you're speaking against our motion today. Be it resolved, Davos is back and more relevant than ever. Let's have your opening statement, please. Thanks very much. Davos is almost completely irrelevant, and it always has been. And that's very much by design.

It's a business conference. It's a business conference that's been brilliantly marketed by its founders, Klaus and Hilda Schwab, as a way to virtue signal by the participants. Everyone gathers, I mean, look, everyone's in favor of multilateral solutions. Yes, we live in a complicated, interconnected world. Yes, it would be wonderful if the institutions that actually have power could get together and fashion solutions to our enormous problems. And Don has done a good job of rattling them off.

certainly the conflict in Ukraine, climate change, we could go on and on. But this particular group of people gathering on top of the, in this oddly charmless village in the Swiss Alps, Davos, these are billionaires, heads of state, the odd celebrity, a lot of very well-intentioned people like Don, a whole bunch of journalists. I've been one of those journalists, I believe 10 different times. But the people who actually have power, the cool kids who actually pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in memberships to attend, these are the heads of large financial firms, large tech firms. These are the people who matter. And they will actually boast that they never set foot inside the Congress Center. It's like a badge of honor. They never attend any of the earnest panel discussions on climate change, on the future of work and automation, social injustices. They just sit in their suites and they do deals with one another. And Klaus Schwab, the founder, actually eagerly plays matchmaker.

It's really about the opportunity for fossil fuel companies in Europe, in North America, to sit opposite a member of the Saudi monarchy with no annoying nuisances like regulators or journalists around. So they can do what they'd be doing anywhere, which is doing deals. And it's all packaged under this monarchy. committed to improving the state of the world, which gives the con away. These people are the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo. They're not about change. They're about convincing us, the rest of the world, that they're about change,

and they can take care of our problems. So we need not do important things like exercise our democratic rights to impose progressive taxation, to regulate, to allow labor unions, to negotiate, to get their piece of the action. Davos is a prophylactic against change, and that has always been its point of relevance since inception. Thank you, Peter. Okay, Don, your opportunity for a rebuttal. I'm going to put a couple of minutes on the show clock and have you react to what you've just heard. Well, let's start by who actually attends.

I look this up. Davos man's, I mean, that term's probably misleading. There are 2,700 attendees, and a handful of them are billionaires. probably less than 1%. And they're not men only. Many are women. 42% of the people on stage are women. There are 700 public figures.

Not all heads of state. They're various government leaders. That's a good thing. Civil society, 500 of them. NGOs, academics, researchers like me, indigenous leaders, social entrepreneurs. They're union leaders representing half a billion people worldwide. Yep, there are lots of journalists.

but that's a lot of good ink about world problems and possible solutions. That's who's at the event. But a really critical point here is that Davos is just one of the thousands of meetings that are curated by the World Economic Forum every year. And they involve over 15,000 people. Peter, 10,000 of these are under the age of 30. They're shapers, the young activists, and leaders from 150,000.

companies. And, you know, I have many conversations with people that share a devils. I met a 30-year-old woman from Brazil who has a network of 8 million followers and they're organizing education for poor women. This is not a prophylactic against change. This is a powerful force for change. And in that conversation, we talked about how blockchain might help what she's doing. I introduced her to our people at the Blockchain Research Institute in South. and they have a collaboration going on. And by the way, as if for being this private thing that happens behind doors, you know, three quarters of the sessions were live streamed.

So, you know, let me just give one quick example if I can't. A big theme this year was the future of work. Okay, short term, many people, businesses, unions, governments, academic, trying to figure out the post-hand pandemic world of hybrid work. work. And you've got Chad GPTs and the rise of generative AI. Everyone's wondering about the bigger issue of work and jobs. And I did a panel with a professor from Berkeley, Stuart Russell, one of the world's leading thinkers about AI. We talked about the implications of all this stuff. You know, and this is a controversial statement, but I think that we're in for a big period of

structural change to our economies. And 48 to 50 states. the number one job type for men is truck driver and for women is cashiers. I think both of those are gone in a decade. And now you've got AI starting to impact knowledge work. So the big discussion was about, you know, we're going to need a guaranteed basic income, but that's necessary, but it's not sufficient for people to lead meaningful lives. People need jobs and they need good jobs, not just work. So, and stuff has happened as a result of this.

I mean, the forum has a rescilling initiative three years ago. It brought together several countries and companies with the goal of reskilling a billion people. You know, there are a third of their way there. 300 million people have become engaged as a result of that. In my view, this is positive and not something that should be dismissed or ridiculed. Thank you, Don. Great rebuttal. Okay, Peter, your opportunity similarly to respond to Don's opening statement or what you've just heard.

Well, it's interesting that Don puts the focus on engagement. That's always the sort of word that we hear out of Davos. We hear lots of jargon, like stakeholder dialogue, which I think is just a fancy term for people talking. Now, do people talk in Davos? Yes. Are some of those people highly intelligent, thoughtful, informed people with the best intentions? yes, without any question. I have benefited for many conversations I've had at Davos over the years.

I've learned things. But the question is what is the relevance of this institution? And we should not mistake the Potemkin conference that is the packaging for the successful business conference for the thing that actually matters. Yeah, okay, if we look at the roster of people who fly to Switzerland and take a train or bus or some lucky enough to helicopter in. Yeah, you know, most of these people are academics, they're journalists, they're ordinary people

who are showing up for a variety of reasons. But the people who are paying the bills are the handful of, and they're really not a handful, actually. They're scores of billionaires, heads of state, heads of consulting companies, financial firms, tech companies. These are the people who actually matter. And there's lots of talk. I mean, in Davos, talk,

has the currency of action. Usually when you talk to people about at the forum or people who are defending the forum, for examples of what good has come out of it, they'll tell you about some initiative or some, you know, some ersatz statement that, you know, we're going to do all of this wonderful stuff. Well, so Don started by talking about Gavi, which is this institution that was created at Davos to promote the availability of vaccines. And it has had some of the, you know, achievements. But let's look at the trial run that we just went through or that we're still in, this pandemic, where institutions like the World Economic Forum have given a mouthpiece to a bunch of pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, like Beyond Tech and Moderna, and thank you for these

wonderful, life-saving vaccines. Turns out, if you're lucky enough to live in a wealthy enough country that can pay the freight for these monopoly products that have capitalized on publicly financed research and despite things like Gavi have basically just gone around the world selling these vaccines to the highest bidder, well, then you get protection. And if you live anywhere else, you don't. And so as a result of this, during this pandemic, we have had frontline medical workers in South Asia, in Africa, treating people with COVID with no protection whatsoever, while everyone in the wealthy world is talking about, you know, giving extra doses to children. because of this tremendous inequality that is enabled by institutions like Davos that offer all sorts of hollow words about inclusivity,

and we'll talk about these vaccine initiatives, while ultimately reinforcing the power balance as it is. Thank you, Peter. Great opening statements and rebuttals. Let me join the conversation now and think of some questions that are top of mind for our listeners. And I want to come to you first on and try to encapsulate a couple of key arguments from Peter's opening statements and his report. buttle just now. Peter is leveling the charge that, you know, Davos at the end of the day is fueled by, powered by, funded by, powerful multinational corporations. And in many cases, they're billionaire investors and owners. To what extent does this mean, Don, that Davos itself is the product of a kind of poison fruit, that its intentions are really geared not towards maybe all the good people and good causes that are featured at Davos conferences, but instead towards the

people paying the bills, towards those big multinationals, towards those billionaire donors. What's your take on that? Well, I would never say that everything that happens at Davos or anywhere else for that matter is always positive. But I don't think that because we have business in the same room often as government and civil society and others that we should say that that's necessarily a bad thing and all and will be co-opted i'll just give you an example um you know climate change big problem okay uh we're gonna lose a billion and a half people are going to lose most of their water supply and what happens when they

become migrants and water supply is just one of a whole bunch of problems so how are we going to fight this. Cop 30? Cop 31? Maybe they'll get it. You know, of course we need nation states, but we need to re-industrialize the planet. And we need everyone involved. Every government, every company, every civil society, organization, every school, every kid in every school yard. And Dallas has been a real wake-up call for a lot of people, you know. And Peter, it's not just packaging or lots of talk, good things have happened. Like several years ago, a trillion trees initiative was started at Davos. 80 companies have made pledges now to plant billions of trees. The Climate Alliance has 100 CEOs from large companies, and they've been working to get

businesses to step up. And they've all agreed on these aggressive goals of a million gigatons annually by 2030. So, you know, this is not the perfect organization. It's not going to save a world. It's one of many venues for people to come together and collaborate to learn from each other and maybe to even come up with some initiatives. Thanks, Don. Okay, Peter, let's come back to Don's point. What's your perspective in terms of how we should be looking at Davos? Is it a question of, you know, power imbalances in the conference, who funds it, who goes, why they go, maybe the greenwashing that you think is going on? Or is Don right? Is he right that there are bigger imperatives at Davos? There's a demonstrable record of progress on tackling some of the world's most important

challenges and problems. Well, we've had a half-century trial run of how it's worked out and how it's worked out is tremendous inequality in most major societies, an erosion of the middle class, a pandemic that has exposed the pitfalls of that inequality, tax avoidance, all sorts of legal and illegal ways to avoid taxes with the downgrading of social safety nets in most of the major economies that should be at the center. of our concern. And that has happened in large part because of the policies that have been championed by the people who actually have power at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos. You know, Don is putting the emphasis on this Trillion Trees initiative. Well, that's great. I mean,

it is useful to plant trees. One of the people who's been most outspoken about that is Mark Benioff, who's one of the, he's a member of the board of trustees at the World Economic Forum. He's the CEO of Salesforce, this large Silicon Valley tech company, who actually said at Davos a couple years ago, it was virtual Davos. They couldn't meet. But he said, CEOs are the real heroes of the pandemic. And this was not some sort of, you know, gaff. I mean, he underscored it. He returned to it. He said, you know, this is because of our vaccines and the credit from financial institutions. And he specifically said, non-governmental organizations didn't save you. Government didn't save you. We saved you. And not for profit, but because of our dedication to.

saving the world. Now, this is the person who actually has great influence over the organization, and he will tell you about the planting of the trillion trees. He will not tell you, or at least he doesn't speak about it unless you ask him, about his membership in the business roundtable, this huge lobby shop in the U.S. that played a leading role in the Trump tax cuts, that produced $1.5 trillion of tax cuts lavished on people like Mark Benioff. He will not tell you that his company despite a lot of talk of his philanthropic efforts, his willingness to tax his own. He actually underwrote a ballot initiative in San Francisco to increase taxes on tech companies to fund advanced services for homeless people, but he will not tell you that his own company

has paid the modest sum of zero on its federal taxes, not once but twice in the last 15 years. And, you know, the net effect of all that is a lot of happy talk, a lot of, you know, tree initiatives, a lot of homeless services, while we're actually reinforcing the drivers of climate change, of homelessness through this tremendous inequality. And ultimately, we have to assess the institution by what happens. And what has happened is the world has become more comfortable for the people who pay the freight at Davos and more perilous for pretty much everyone else. Okay, Don, do you want to take up that argument?

Well, I'm not sure what we're debating here. Is the issue billionaires and their power in the world? I think we're in agreement on that. First time in modern history, we have wealth creation and declining prosperity. Economies are growing, the middle class is shrinking. And I've written about this, I believe as strongly as you do, the bifurcation of wealth and a handful of people have captured too much of it. It's not just unfair.

It distorts society. We've got billionaires like Elon Musk being the arbitrary. of eight speech on social media or deciding who gets elected. But I thought the debate was about what happens at Davos and what is the world economic form. And the end results are, and I don't think you can blame the world economic form for the problems the world is facing. And I'm sure not going to get in a debate about defending the pharmaceutical industry and its role in the global pandemic. You know, yes, we have a big problem with tax cuts and sure you may have CEOs who save businesses have saved the world. But the one thing I do agree with you is that

ultimately we do need to assess an institution based on what happens. And what happens at Davos overall, in my mind, is a really positive thing. I mean, and a lot of us is just the serendipity of what goes on there. My wife was the chair of the board of the big psychiatric research institute in Canada. And many years ago, she ran into a young psychiatrist who had developed this app to help patients better manage their illnesses. And she came home and she told the board all about it. And eventually, CAMH, the third largest psychiatric institution in the world, had embraced this idea and this had a big impact on people's lives. That's good stuff.

And I could talk all day about just examples that I've personally seen or participated in. Okay, good point, Don. So, Peter, is this attention and the focus on Davos Fair? As Don said, there are thousands of other conferences happening all around the world. There's the Aspen Institute, the Trilateral Commission. I could go on and on. You know, why do we call Davos-Ev? Is it because simply it's so high-profile

because it chooses to make itself available to the media because it live-streams all of its events? I guess what I'm getting at here, Peter, is this simply a case of the Tall Poppy syndrome? You know, the group that puts up its head gets it cut off. And those that are more secretive, less transparent are the ones that skate by and don't get the same kind of sustained scrutiny and criticism that you're leveling against an organization like Davos?

Well, Don began by going back to Bretton Woods and talking about multilateral solutions to international problems, and that's in the context of the conversation about the World Economic Forum, which would like us to see it in that context. And again, this is not, you know, Forbes or Fortune convening business people to talk about how to make lots of money. This is not a conference that's just devoted to climate change with a bunch of activists who are running the show. This is a gathering convened by Klaus Schwab under the mantra committed to improving the state of the world. This is someone who travels around like a head of state, who's accorded the privileges of a dignitar. of a dignitary as he's flying around usually at the expense of some favored contributor to the

forum cause like Swiss Air. This is somebody who lives in a lakefront mansion in Geneva with his meals furnished by the forum. The forum as an institution has purchased all this land that connects this palatial headquarters on the lake to his own residence and would like us. to view him. I mean, he has told people who have worked for him that he's deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. So certainly the scrutiny is justified. Now, Don would like us to talk about, you know, what actually goes on at Davos? Here are some of the things that actually go on at

Davos. Claus Schwab, using his platform as convener, has actually stood on stage next to Donald Trump, after those tax cuts, congratulating him for improving the inclusivity of the American economy. He has stood next to Narendra Modi of India, within months of a member of Modi's own party, placing a million-dollar bounty on the head of a Bollywood director for supposedly offending a Hindu legend and has praised him for running an incredibly diverse society. I've seen John Kabat-Zinn, the mindfulness guru, conduct meditation sessions for pharmaceutical executives, before they retire to their suites to go talk about the deal that's going to lift drug prices. I've seen billionaires engage in, I'm not making this up, a simulation of the Syrian refugee experience

where they're let around blindfolded in the dark while someone's hollering at them in Arabic, demanding papers, and then they congratulate one another for their empathy, and they go off to a banquet hosted by HSBC or Google, whomever, and they drink champagne and eat truffles. I mean, these are the things that actually happen at Davos. So it is ultimately a platform for people who are not content to make most of the money. They want our adulation and they want it for a strategic reason because that's the way of preventing us from exercising our democratic rights to actually have a say about how global capitalism works and who gets the bounty. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus.

And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long, and it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk Debates. Simply access via our website, triplew monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same

podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program. Okay, Don, let me go back to something you said at the beginning of the debate because it's an interesting point. It's about the importance of international institutions at this moment of international instability and rapid change. Some people would say, Don, that the problem with the challenge of Davos, that it's replacing those international institutions. national institutions. It's replacing public institutions that are ultimately accountable back to the democratic legislatures of various nation-states and the voters that make those legislatures an expression of their democratic will. Is it any coincidence, for example, that the World Trade Organization

today is a complete and under shambles? You can go through a whole list of global multilateral institutions and it's a story of decline. Yet Davos seems to thrive. Don, is there a trade-off here? Let's address that point. Well, to me, this is not a sort of zero-sum game. First of all, we need our representative institutions. You know, Peter in the book, you talk about the sanctity of representative democracy. I couldn't agree with you more, actually. By the way, at Davos, there was a fantastic discussion about that involving the chairman, founder of the New York Times, sorry, not the founder, but the publisher of the New York Times, where we talked about the breakdown of social capital, the crisis of trust, the crisis of legitimacy of

our democratic institutions in the United States. And this is a terrifying thing. You know, in the United States you have a third of the population. It thinks that the election was faked. You know, it was probably the most screwed. election in American history, maybe any history. So we have a big challenge in protecting these representative institutions. But how are we going to do that? Well, we need to strengthen democracy, but we also need to strengthen cooperation amongst these three pillars of society.

Are they all good actors? Definitely not. Are there people who would manipulate us and try and trick us? trick us for sure. But you know you talk about Klaus Schwab. He's got a nice office on Lake Geneva. Well, so does a Red Cross, you know, and so do lots of other global institutions and some hidden agenda. Well, you know, I don't judge people based on some hidden theory about them. I judge a person or an organization rather than on their hidden motives of what they do and what

actually happens in the world. My experience is that overall all good things happen as a result of the forum. Thanks, Don. So, Peter, come back on that. Let's hear your argument on the Democratic deficit, because I get a sense that's a key part of your critique of Davos. Sure. Yeah, I thought it was revealing, Don, that you just said, you know,

it's not a zero-sum game. Well, some things are a zero-sum game. And the, you know, the magic of Davos, the sense of decorum there is always like, we're looking for win-win solutions. You know, a win-win solution is by definition a thing in which no one actually has to sacrifice. And I've spent years at Davos, you know, listening to the wealthiest people on earth, bemoan inequality and talking, you know, very creatively about the things that we have to do to address inequality.

And usually it's, you know, working people have to retrain themselves. And I've heard Ray Dalio say, we know, we need. need to, he's the hedge fund guy who goes to Davos regularly. We, we need to unleash the animal spirits of the market and make it easier for people to earn money, which is a very interesting thing to hear from someone who's managed to abase a fortune of 18 billion dollars. You know, it's always everything except for, oh, we need progressive taxation. We need labor to be able to organize so they can get a piece of the action. We need antitrust and enforcement so that real businesses, real entrepreneurs, can thrive instead of just being squashed by monopolists.

These are not things that you hear at Davos because the game is about win-win solutions. And that's why, you know, I remember attending a panel years ago on, you know, why are drug prices so high? And it was the heads of large pharmaceutical companies. And they were all asked to a pint, you know, is it the model? Have we not struck the right messaging? What's going on? Everything except for, oh, we've actually rigged the system so that we exploit the hell out of the markets, and we capitalize on publicly financed research, and then we charge as much as the market will bear,

so that we set up a thing that's really good for shareholders and not good for society. That's not something anyone says out loud there. And so, you know, ultimately, Davos is a kind of alternative to democracy, because democracy would allow people to pull the levers for things that they actually. want, which it turns out from society's society, shouldn't shock anybody. Health care, housing, the ability to send kids to college, the ability to take a vacation to work and live in a decent place and be treated with dignity. And these are things that are actually antithetical to the modes of the people who are paying the freight at Davos. Now, I don't traffic in conspiracy theories

or, you know, Don refers to, you know, Klaus Schwab's hidden agenda. What does he actually do? What he actually does is he runs this world economic forum, this institution, in a very undemocratic, not transparent way. I mean, I reveal in the book how he actually uses the forum, which is a nominal nonprofit in Switzerland, as a kind of venture capital fund for profit-making enterprises, including an events business that then manages the hotels and the catering for the forum itself at its meetings around the world. He started a video conferencing software back during the dot-com bubble, and at the last minute, when he flipped it to a publicly traded company, had the money go not back to the forum, but to the Klaus and Hilda Schwab Foundation. I had the guy who actually ran it, tell me this on the record. You can read it in my book if you're interested. And we don't know where that money goes. We're told that it goes to drill wells in Africa and help Pakistani girls go to school.

and that all sounds great, but it's not verifiable because this institution isn't transparent. So cooperation's great. We should all talk to each other. We need cooperation to solve the world's problems. But this institution is really about helping people make money while protecting them from the tax man. Thanks, Peter.

We're going to go to closing statements in a moment, but a final question to you, Dawn. Is the essence of a valid critique of Davos that it's simply at the end of the day undemocratic, that participants are not selected on any basis that they represent actual real constituencies that have elected them to a position to speak on behalf of everyone else.

Instead, Davos is what it is. It's a collection of powerful and influential people who are selected simply on the basis of their, power and influence. So let's hear you, Don, on this point that Peter's raising, that Davos is fueling all of our anxiety about the extent to which we have a democratic deficit in our society, that much of the issues that we care about, the causes that we would like to have addressed, are being shaped by a powerful elite, that same elite who gather. at Davos every year? Well, I would say that it's not a democracy, it's not intended to be,

and many organizations are not, including NGOs and global institutions. The question is, and that's for transparency, I mean, there is a global board that's got a lot of really important people on it, not just business leaders, but leaders who have a very, significant reputation in the world to defend. And if there was some fancy footwork going on, Peter, as you allege, I think that you'd have real trouble putting a board together like that. You know, and the term elites, I mean, yeah, they're elites, you know, decision makers, people with power in business, government. As for the civil society, they're the elite. They're the They're the cream of the crop.

That woman I met from Brazil, she's going to be a huge player in the future of that country from that conversation that we had. Cream of the crop of academics, of NGO, civil society leader, Stuart Russell is the cream of the crop in understanding the impact of AI on the world. But you know, we have this problem today with our view of elites. You know, we have elite science. that think that climate change is a big problem. And we have elite medical personnel

who think that vaccines are a good thing. We have all kinds of elites trying to trick us into doing things. Let's just all stand back and chill for a second and try and understand that society is not a simple thing where you go and vote and governments do everything for you. Everyone has a role to play. And the World Economic Forum is simply one of those vehicles that brings together people to learn from each other and to collaborate

and sometimes really good things happen. Thank you, Don. You're listening to our debate. Davos is back and it's more relevant than ever. Peter, let's move to closing statements. You can react to what you've just heard from Don and wrap this debate up for us in terms of what key points you'd like to leave with our listeners. Sure.

So I thought that last statement from you, Don, was tremendously helpful and revealing. you know, this idea that we can count on the good people at Davos doing good things, because if they didn't, well, their reputations would be damaged and then no one would participate. I mean, if we actually believe that and that that's a real check on the problems that we face from the abuses of the winners in society, it's sort of difficult to know where to begin. We have lived in a decades-long experiment in what I call the cosmic lie in the book. You could call it trickle-down economics. You could call it what you like.

But essentially, it's the idea that we need less government, less regulation, less supervision. We need to let the dynamic forces of the market solve our problems. And we've depended upon the supposed basic decency of the market participants, counterparty risk models in finance, people like me, journalists who will find out the dark secrets and that will be a check on the process. And, you know, that hasn't worked out really well. I mean, the people who are on the board at Davos include Larry Fink of BlackRock. He's the world's largest asset manager before stock markets corrected. He was managing in excess of $10 trillion U.S.

He's still managing around $8 trillion. And at the time in which he was doing Klaus Schwab's bidding and telling us about stakeholder capitalism, which has not come up in this conversation so far, but this idea that, you know, companies are not just maximizing profits. Now they're catering to stakeholders like, you know, labor, never labor unions. They're very careful about that. But labor, local communities, Mark Benioff, once we marked, you know, the planet is a stakeholder, which is very helpful to those of us who live on the planet. at the time that Larry Fink was joining the chorus in favor of stakeholder capitalism, he was

personally turning the screws to Argentina in the middle of the pandemic, this terrible public health crisis, poverty rising, to make sure that his company got paid back on a bunch of bonds that he had credulously purchased from the previous government. And that doesn't seem to stop other people from consorting with him at Davos. It doesn't seem to stop the board from doing its business. Now, Don talks about the crisis of elites. It is indeed a crisis. It is a real problem that facts don't have the currency that they have, that we're having to listen to nonsense from anti-vaxers and climate change deniers. But the source of the distrust of elites comes from a legitimate place. It comes from the reality that over the last half century, elites have used

their power to help people who have money take the levers of our democracy so they can use our democracy and help the wealthy people make more money. That part really happened. The people in deindustrialized communities from the north of England to Canada to the U.S. to anywhere, they may be wrong when they glom on to terrible solutions to their problems, like demonizing immigrants or buying into absurd conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum. But they're not crazy when they look at their experience over the last.

last half century and they say, boy, these elites, they don't seem all that interested in people like us or our problems or our ability to put groceries on our table and take care of our families. So the solution to that is to hold the elites to account and not to simply say, well, let's chill and all, you know, trust in the elites. The trust in the elites is what's gotten us into this mess. It's time for actual democracy, which involves checks and balances and getting over the idea that institutions like the forum, which is really ultimately just a mouthpiece for the billionaire class, can be trusted to solve our problems. We're going to have to solve our problems for ourselves through democracy. Peter, thank you for your closing statement. You've been listening to our debate today,

be it resolved Davos is back and more relevant than ever. Don Tapscott, you've been arguing in favor of the motion. Let's give you the last word in today's conversation. Thanks very much. You know, Peter, you keep referring to the billionaire class and those who attend Davos. A tiny percent of people of Davils are billionaires in an infinitesimal proportion of the people, the 15,000 people involved in the world economic form in 160 countries are billionaires. And as an aside, a big theme at Davos this year was how do we save democracy in our representative institution, saving actual democracy? I attended a conference about the bifurcation of wealth and the the and the implications of a decline on

prosperity for for civilization and so on so let me just end with this story you know one session this year Al Gore talked about a thin blue line apparently when when astronauts go into space there's a very thin blue line they can see around the planet this is five to seven kilometers thick You can drive a car through it, he says, in five minutes. He says, every day we dump 600,000 Hiroshima's into that. And he called it a latrine. In the same panel, a leader of the National Congress of American Indians,

talked about how indigenous groups were tackling the problem. Everyone in the room was challenging governments and companies to step up bigger and faster. And these kinds of sessions have led to important connections. and initiatives. It's not a bad thing. You know, for government and civil society leaders to hear about how Germany's dealing with the energy crisis or why, you know, President Zelensky of the Ukraine says businesses should support their resistance or one session discussing the implications of quantum computing on society or why a minimum wage is not enough, what

it means to have a good job. You know, I was at sessions on how to improve. food security, how to get education to girls in the developing world, how misinformation it's hurting democracy and civilization and so on. So, you know, good things happen when people get together. And, you know, it's hard for countries, states, anyone to succeed in a world that's failing. And we have big problems in the world today. And the web is an example of a new type of organization that's trying to contribute and trying to be helpful. I won't defend everyone

who goes there or everything that they say, but when you add it all up, this is not negative. It's making a difference. Thank you, Don and Peter for a terrific debate on behalf of the Monk Debates membership. I greatly appreciate the civility and substance you brought to our conversation. We've touched on so many of the big issues and ideas that I hope we would over this time we've spent together. Thank you again. Thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. Thank you to our participants, Don and Peter, for a terrific debate. We'd love your feedback and reflections on what you've just heard. Please send us email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Also, while we've got to you, scroll down on this feed and check out a sample of last week's Friday-focused podcast. Yes,

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