Davos: How an elite meeting in the mountains became so divisive - YouTube

Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

Just imagine the net worth of some of the people that have passed through this building

over the last few decades.

Usually held in this Swiss ski resort in the middle of winter,

the pandemic delayed the 2022 edition till spring.

The warmer weather may have melted the snow and ice here in Davos,

but as the super-rich get wealthier and anti-establishment sentiment grows,

has enthusiasm for this gathering of the global elite gone cold?

The pandemic wasn’t bad for everyone.

While many people suffered dramatic health and economic hardships, the wealth of the

world’s billionaires saw its biggest increase since records began.

Although the global gap between the average incomes of the richest 10% and the poorest

50% has narrowed in recent years , it's a different story for the top 1%.

Since 1995, average wealth has grown at 3.2% per year.

But the richest individuals on earth grew their wealth

at an average of 6 to 9% per year.

A separate report found that the world’s 2,755 billionaires added

$5 trillion to their cumulative wealth in 2021.

In the same year, the world’s 10 richest people added more than $400 billion to their

fortunes, with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gaining $121 billion.

Which brings us back to Davos, where many of the world’s richest and most powerful

people, the majority of whom are men, convene for a weeklong get-together.

Even before the pandemic, the event drew protestors

campaigning for social justice and climate action.

One of those protestors many years ago was Philipp Wilhelm.

These days however, he’s the town's mayor.

How important is the World Economic Forum's yearly meeting to Davos?

I mean, it's really important in the sense of name recognition for our alpine city here.

A lot of people know the name Davos because of this event we have here and then

there's also an economical point-of-view.

It is important because there's a lot of a lot of work for this whole redesign of the Davos

promenade and of course the overstays and so on,

they generate a lot of income for local people as well.

Before the pandemic, some of the businesses in Davos

made about 40% of their annual income during the conference.

It’s estimated that the WEF meeting brings in between

€50m and €60m to the local economy.

You yourself use to protest against the World Economic Forum, or at least parts of it during

the annual meeting.

Why?

When I grew up, I kind of got in touch with this, with the issues, which were discussed

here, the distribution of power, of money, of wealth, as well, and also the climate situation.

So, are the people at the World Economic Forum worried about the event’s detractors?

If so, what are they doing about it?

I visited the organization’s headquarters in Geneva a week before their

big return to the mountains to find out.

The pandemic has shown that the existing inequality in societies have now started showing its

fractures and that is also exactly why we need to double down on these efforts and ensure

that the leaders are building the alliances, the partnerships to make change move much

faster than it has so far.

Saadia Zahidi is a managing director at the World Economic Forum.

She heads up the programming group that puts together the annual event in Davos.

How much real change actually happens in these meetings?

So the forum's work is ongoing.

The meeting is one marker in time, what we've been doing over the last two and a half years,

while it hasn't been visible through a particular meeting is a set of work that is trying to

make a dent on inequality.

And at the same time, also make changes towards addressing one of the biggest existential

risks we all face, which is climate change.

Has the rising economic inequality between the super-rich and everyone else become a

bit of a problem for the World Economic Forum and the annual meeting?

Inequality is a problem for the world.

Societies that do not combat inequality will have slower growth.

And so there has to be an effort that addresses inequality.

Now, what does that, better education, better skills, better jobs, addressing issues like

taxation, and changing the nature of our economies so that they

actually work for people and not just for the few.

And that is going to be front and center on next week's agenda.

To emphasise the importance of making these changes, WEF’s theme for the 2022 annual

meeting is History at a Turning Point: Government Policies and Business Strategies.

The themes for the last four annual meetings have also been slogans aimed at some of these concerns.

2018 was all about ‘ a shared future in a fractured world’.

2019 – a new economic era: Globalization 4.0.

2020 – ‘Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World’

and 2021 – ‘The great reset’.

But this doesn’t seem to have had much effect in reducing opposition to the event.

In fact, the term, which was also the title of a book co-authored by WEF founder Klaus

Schwab, was widely used by conspiracy theorists on the far right and left.

Hundreds of thousands of posts using the phrase circulated on social media during the height

of the pandemic, with some of the most popular claiming these so-called conspirators were

using the virus to bring about total economic collapse.

We, like many other organisations have been the target of misinformation campaigns.

And that is something that we're very proactively trying to work towards combating.

And we believe in facts.

We believe in science, we believe in evidence, and we believe in expertise.

And that's, you know, what the 100 or so experts that are gathered at this meeting, along with

business leaders and political leaders, that's what they're going to provide.

One of the more mainstream criticisms of WEF is that while a lot of time is spent talking

about philanthropic ideas, there’s a real lack of discussion about tax evasion.

In 2019, a clip of Dutch historian Rutger Bregman speaking on a panel at WEF went viral.

Ten years ago, the World Economic Forum asked a question: what must industry do to prevent

a broad social backlash?

The answer’s very simple, just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes.

Max Lawson is Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam.

They, along with many other social justice groups, organize protests during WEF.

The reason that Davos is angered, so many people, it's not because of the meeting itself.

But because what it symbolises, it symbolises the lack of democracy in our world, the sense

that we have to listen to the super rich more than we listen to ordinary people.

The World Economic Forum is good at raising some issues.

But ultimately, the problem is billionaires.

They pay less tax as a proportion of their income than you are I do that the nurse or

a cleaner does, that's what hurts society.

The backlash against Davos has also become a political hot potato.

The increasingly cosy relationship between business and politics is no more apparent

than at WEF – prompting many political leaders, amidst rising anti-elitist sentiment, to avoid

the annual meeting altogether.

Over the past decade, heads of state for the world’s biggest economies have regularly

shown their faces at the event.

But in 2022, most of them will be absent.

It is still quite some work,

I was going to say.

It will be ready.

Overseeing the operations and event production for the meeting is Severin Podolak.

Tell me a bit about how this annual meeting has changed over the last, say 10 years?

Well, I think the crucial part about the annual meeting is always the programme.

The frame is more or less equal every year.

But then of course, depending on which constituents are or more present, you have to change slightly

the operations. This year, we have over 2,200 participants.

And it's quite a complex planning. It's like a mosaic.

Overall, at the moment, we have roughly 1,500 people involved in the setup or in the operations.

This is Olympic sized pool.

So it's all underneath

And we cover it Yes.

Wow.

There are the divers going down and those are the foundations coming.

Yes. Unbelievable.

How long does that take?

We just took it over end last week.

Just started last week. Wow.

Business leaders wanting to participate in WEF pay between $60,000 and $600,000.

While everyone else, including heads of state, media,

celebrities and civil society leaders get free entry.

But despite the noble goals of the main event, a lot of the action takes place on the sidelines

– whether it be lucrative business deals, networking or company-sponsored events.

These side events, they kind of come with the success of the forum itself.

So a lot of people find it interesting to be here during that week.

We know that the forum itself is not overly fond with the side events it's actually not

possible for us to kind of prevent that from happening.

We are exploring to regulate so all these buildings for these side events so all these

buildings have to use renewable energy for heating.

But, for the World Economic Forum their focus is firmly on the global strategies that this

year’s theme is aiming to address.

How do you build the markets for tomorrow, where should investment go, so that we don't

just have an economic recovery, but we actually get to the kind of inclusive and sustainable

growth that we need.

This meeting provides us a milestone, a point of connection for people to be able to learn

from each other but it's not the beginning and it's not the end.