(WP) – Greetings from the snowy slopes of virtual Davos. No, Today’s World-View did not make the trek up the mountain to the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of global political and business elites.
Because of the pandemic, there was no physical event to attend, no schmoozing with the great and the good, no rubbing shoulders with policymakers at pop-up espresso bars, no foraging for canapés in the pavilions of big tech firms.
Advertisement
But, through its digital platform, the forum’s organizers nevertheless set out an agenda that’s arguably more ambitious than before. Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive chairman,
invoked the need to help provoke a “great reset” around the world in the wake of the pandemic. “The covid-19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century,” he said in a podcast ahead of events this week.
What does that reset look like? Schwab and his colleagues are pushing the concept of “stakeholder” capitalism — an approach to business and economic policymaking that looks beyond the interests of shareholders and toward the well-being of society (and fleshed out now in a new book by Schwab and his colleague Peter Vanham).
For many years, WEF has embraced this sort of socially conscious language, urging corporate leaders to be more politically minded and governments to better collaborate with the private sector on a swath of development projects and social programs. WEF points to a growing catalogue of positive initiatives taken by governments and commitments made by major corporations thanks to the convening power of Davos. READ MORE