The major theme of this year’s World Economic Forum, which has become the premier gathering of economists, futurists and globalized big business, was officially “Priorities for the 21st Century.”
But as preparation proceeded for this meeting of the 2,000 people who descend upon this beautiful Alpine town every winter, the planners very deliberately brought in the financial crisis in East Asia as a counter-theme. And that was surely appropriate, given the global threat from the Asian collapse.
The meetings and discussions continued well into the night with extraordinary intensity, and most of the CEOs and economists were going along with the bailout of the failed (or at least troubled) economies of Southeast Asia.
Only once in a while did one hear some maverick say something like: “Hey, by pumping IMF money into these economies, we’re just paying off the bad banks of the crony capitalists of Asia and rewarding the people who got the world into this pickle.”
In the last session, speakers spoke of how the connections of the Internet would bring people all across the globe together in new and better forms of dialogue and understanding.
It was Nathan Myhrvold, the chief technology officer for Microsoft Corp., which so often leads in idealistic, utopian ideas about the technologies, who gave the most revealing answer to what the form of the new world would be. “Well,” he said, “democracy in the future will be local, but the issues of our day are no longer local. Environment, for instance, is a problem that is around the world. We need to deal with the questions that are global.”
Another example of this kind of thinking came from Donald J. Johnston, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, as he explained how his organization operates in this new world milieu. “We are not an institution but a process,” he said. “We represent 29 industrial nations, and we essentially bring people together to dialogue and develop standards consensually. This may well be the way of the future.”
The problem is, how exactly do you do all of this? How do you organize people in a “society” of the Internet to attack real problems? Aren’t you creating instead of real human dialogue, an electronic Tower of Babel? Who negotiates on behalf of whom in the kind of reasonably orderly manner that nation-states must strive for?
In contrast to the utopian ideas of the Internet globalizers and consensus-builders, labor leaders who must work in the collapsing labor market of Southeast Asia are distraught.
More Top Picks Curtains
“We’re already seeing an explosion of unrest all over the place,” Philip J. Jennings, general secretary of the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees in Geneva, told the group. “There’s been this kind of euphoria that (globalization) is the way forward, but in fact . . . the process of globalization is exacerbating the differences between people because . . . the differences in income levels are just not sustainable.
“On the social side, the Asian crisis is only beginning to be seen. We have 350 million people living on $1 a day . . . unemployment booming . . . several million already out of work in Indonesia . . . the same in Thailand . . . no safety nets at all.”
So when we look, not cynically, but realistically, at the world out there, we have to wonder about the real effects of globalized thought and economies.
As for me, just call me: gg(AT)sorrybutunconvinced.com.