At Davos, Capitalists Are Trying to Solve the Problems They Themselves Create
At the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos this week, elites will try to address problems from climate change to the threat of worldwide recession. But these elites’ endless thirst for profit created these problems — and will doom their efforts to fail.
US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Gregory Meeks (center), president of Moldova Maia Sandu (second from right) and prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin (second from left) speak at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 17, 2023. (Dursun Aydemir / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
At the start of each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) — organizer of the annual Davos conference currently underway in Switzerland — releases its list of the “global risks” expected to dominate over the following twelve months. This year, researchers at the WEF decided that these risks are so great, and so interwoven, that we are now entering an era of “polycrisis.”
The clearest risk in the immediate term is a global recession. The UK, most of Europe, and the United States are pretty much guaranteed to go into recession in 2023. The downturn will be worse in Europe due to the ongoing energy crisis and the war in Ukraine.
The fact that an inflationary crisis — and, relatedly, a cost-of-living crisis — is taking place alongside this economic downturn makes the outlook even more grim. We’ve had a decade of slow growth, and looking ahead, it’s hard to see where growth is going to come from in the future.
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