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When you arrive at Davos, you can quickly spot the different grades of attendee by the colour of their badge

Annual event was once a forum aimed squarely at policy wonks and economists. Not any more

One of many police officers around Davos at the opening of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

Eoin Burke-Kennedy's face
Eoin Burke-Kennedy
Tue Jan 16 2024 - 05:00

In its infancy Davos was a rather dry affair, the preserve of boring company men and tweed-jacket economists who met to discuss management techniques and “stakeholder capitalism”. The original organisers in the 1970s gave it the instantly repellent title the European Management Forum. You might have been sent there if your boss wanted you out of the way.

How the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering evolved from that into a champagne and caviar-saturated playground for the super-rich jetting in to discuss changing the world even though the status quo seems to suit them down to the ground is something of a mystery.

A lot of it though has to do with its founder Klaus Schwab, a German engineer and economist, who at 85 remains the event’s main driving force. As Vanity Fair noted recently, Schwab “developed the forum from an earnest meeting of policy wonks into a glittering assembly of the world’s richest people. He achieved this by ingratiating himself with those who wield power, and especially the billionaire class – a tribe known as Davos Man”.

Of course when you get here, you quickly realise there are different grades of Davos men and women with different colour badges, denoting their social status, their access to events and, yes, those champagne and caviar parties.

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Effectively there’s a caste system. At the very top are the white badges with special insignia that denote high-level participants or heads of state, the ones who come for the day and leave in a swoosh of minders. Then it’s orange, green, purple, blue and red (an order that’s too confusing to explain).

The town goes into lockdown for the week of the event. Police with automatic weapons patrol the streets. French president Emmanuel Macron, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman are among this year’s A-listers.

In recent years the meeting has given rise to a myriad of conspiracy theories, none bigger than the notion that there is cabal of super-powerful people meeting to plot and control the global economy. In far-right circles Schwab is a hate figure.

The forum’s 2020 theme – “the great reset” – morphed into an online conspiracy which claimed that a global elite was using the pandemic to enforce radical social change upon an unsuspecting public.

While it is criticised as a talking shop for the world’s privileged 1 per cent, it is also – at its heart – a forum to lobby political and business leaders for change.

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