Do We Need the World Economic Forum?

the world economic forum is an international non-government organization that doesn't technically have any practical power like the IMF World Bank or World Trade Organization does even still every year it attracts some of the most powerful economists policy makers business Executives celebrities religious leaders journalists and politicians to a summit that holds in Davos a small skiing town in Switzerland with no real International function it can be hard to understand why so many powerful people go so far out of their way to attend an event that has been m in controversy almost since its Inception the world

economic Forum itself honestly hasn't done much good to ease those controversies and has in many ways intentionally made them worse by pushing ideas that most people might even agree with in ways that are clearly going to be controversial inflammatory misleading and worst of all counterproductive to the arguments they're trying to make unfortunately this often means that controversies around the true role of the world economic Forum are often dominated by critics that assume everything that they do is inherently evil and that Davos is little more than a meeting of super villains to discuss their plans for

world domination now when a secretive organization hosts the world the most powerful people in a remote Mountain Hideout to discuss critical aspects of the global economy and then use branding terms like the great reset it's understandable why people are genuinely concerned about the influence of this organization now I know I shouldn't say this at the beginning of a video that I want you to watch the whole way through but the level-headed reality is far less interesting than lizard people in world domination but in many ways it might be even worse and to understand why we

need to as always answer a few important questions so how did the world economic Forum grow to be as powerful and influential as it is today what is the supposed role of the organization and finally what are the genuine problems with the world economic Forum that tend to get overlooked by the more sensationalist conspiracies access to new technology can really level the playing field and when talented people get access to new digital tools for free or nearly free a lot of cool Innovations can happen very quickly but this technology is also open to being used

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get 60% off in cogni so head over there and sign up now the world economic forum is often thought about in the same group as other International organizations like the World Bank the international monetary fund the World Trade Organization and even the United Nations these are all large entities that are clearly involved in macroeconomic geopolitical and even social issues around the world but in a way that's not immediately clear now while there are a lot of similarities between these groups they all do a lot of independent economic research they provide advice to policy makers they

employ thousands of economists and they all operate as a supposedly impartial force between National governments the world economic forum is different because it wasn't created by governments and it doesn't get its funding from them either something like the World Bank was formed from a delegation of 44 countries after the second world war the world bank now has 189 member countries that all contribute funding to the organization through their National budgets to various degrees some member countries don't contribute anything and some very wealthy Nations like the USA contribute a lot this particular organization uses that money

with the intention of providing loans to developing economies so that they can make investments into infrastructure and tooling to become a productive member of the global economy that is the world bank's clear and public objective and while they do other stuff like collecting economic data a lot of which we use here on this channel when addressing things like GDP figures they only do this so that they have the data that they need to carry out their primary Mandate of providing funding to developing economies the World Bank doesn't really care if we have reliable data to

put on the economics explain leaderboard or not the world economic Forum on the other hand was not created by Nations it had a far more modest origin story it was founded by CLA Schwab an engineer and business professor originally as the European management Forum Schwab got a grant from the European commission to host a conference where Western European business Executives were invited to Davos to learn about different management practices been employed by companies in the more economically successful USA it was really not much different to most boring management seminars happening all over the world today

but over time though the scope and guest list of these annual conferences expanded to include global macroeconomic concerns and the policy makers who could make them a reality now a lot of politicians and policy makers are not economists most of them have a background in law so they usually need to learn about the economic implications of their decisions and policies from economic advisers there is a genuine value to having a platform like the DeVos conference where the people that are making the big decisions in our own economies can learn about what has worked and what

has not worked in other countries from economists from all over the world there's a reason why the UK took took a 100 years to fully industrialize but it only took a country like South Korea two decades that's because our world is now really good at sharing technological and economic knowhow So in theory something like the Davos conference can be a real Force for good in the world but what's more important is how it acts in reality it should be noted that the world economic Forum insists that the annual Summit in Davos is not a conference

it's instead a series of meetings between participants although there's really no discernable technical difference so uh whatever the organization and also now does a lot more than just host the annual conference that it's best known for every year it funds and publishes economic research pushes initiatives like its trillion tree campaign and also gives out Awards to people that it decides have had a positive impact on the world the funding for these events and other operations for the nonprofit are provided not by governments but mostly by businesses who want to be involved in these talks companies

that want to attend the Davos meeting and be engaged with the forum's activities have to pay substantial membership fees that can be over $600,000 a year on top of individual admission costs of course the the organization even though it is nonprofit needs to get its funding from somewhere but this in itself created the first genuine problem with the world economic Forum the list of companies that currently partner with the WF is extremely long and it includes a very good share if not a majority of major International corporations from every industry around the world this makes

it a bit difficult for the world economic Forum to genuinely accommodate what it claims to which is an intellectual Community for the Frank exchange of ideas their annual meetings in the past have had a strong focus on things like sustainable capitalism environmentalism renew able energy development and social entrepreneurship but while it boasts of its independence it wouldn't be possible for the WF to continue its operations without this long list of international companies paying to keep it going the small disclaimer here is that on a much more modest scale even the team here at e needs

to consider that if we take money from a sponsor to make a video we can't talk about stuff that would hurt that sponsor's business which is why we try to avoid anything that could conflict with an unbiased analysis of the topics we want to discuss so when the world economic Forum wants to host discussions about a shift away from fossil fuels while being sponsored by BP shell and ramco it raises an obvious question if it effectively Advocates against the best interest of these corporations why do they still support it this either means that it is

not effective in which case all of the big talk about making the world a better place is just greenwashing or there is some other reason that it's worth it for these companies to still be there another criticism of the organization and its meetings is that these initiatives are hard to take seriously with such blatant hypocrisy amongst attendees all the talk of a green economy or sustainable capitalism won't do much good when the people with the power to influence this change flew in to talk about it on a mission spewing private jets for an event that

is so well funded there have also been criticisms that the Swiss government has to spend millions of dollars every year providing security and Davos perhaps the even more concerning thought though is that if the topics discussed at Davos do effectively find their way into real policy debates that have the potential to hurt the companies paying to make it all possible they pay up anyway because there is a more important reason to be involved the stuff that happens behind closed doors most of the talks Q q a panels and roundtables that happen at Davos are available

to watch online which is great but it also means that instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars attendees could just get the same information online for free if the open discussions and free exchange of ideas really were the true drawer of Doos it wouldn't make sense to be paying that much for it when it could be had for free of course the real reason that companies pay so much to attend this event is to be involved in the discussions that are not posted online which means that most of the talks and panelists are vaguely

marketable window dressing for the real attraction which is a networking event for some of the most powerful people in the world one lucrative deal hammered out with a world leader or even another company executive would pay the price of admission a thousand times over and the price have not been involved is that a business might get cut out of an opportunity that gets discussed at this event and granted to their competition part of the reason that the world economic forum and the Davos meetings get as much criticism as they do is the understandable animosity that

people have towards a big club that they're not invited to especially when that club is discussing things that could have a very tangible impact on the way that they live their lives it also in many ways tracks from their apparent mission of acting as a forum for a broad range of ideas when the barriers to have a voice at the event are so high and the group of people that regularly attend the event do so so regularly and change so infrequently that CL Schwab himself is referred to it as the Davos family usually the people

who are coming to Davos are part of this what I would call Davos Community uh of regulars the same people in the same location all from the same overwhelmingly privileged backgrounds are not going to have the broadest ideas opinions and objectives or even objectives that align with regular people for that matter they could lower these barriers to entry but they won't because their major Partners want a place to Lobby not a place to hear about the challenges of workingclass families these concerns over time naturally evolve from it would be nice to know what gets talked

about at Davos to their lizard people secretly plotting to take over the world now the world economic Forum also could have taken steps to address these concerns but for some reason they've gone in completely the opposite direction and seem to be trying to put out the conspiracy bonfire fire with gasoline the best example of this is that every year they have a general theme that they run their meetings around that most of the presentations are supposed to link back to a big Focus from a few years ago was the Great reset we did an entire

video on that back when it was first announced because the world economic forum and organization that is supposed to be about the clear discussion of ideas did an absolutely terrible job of explaining what the great reset even was in reality it was just a thought experiment about how the global economy could be built back better after the global pandemic since it was such a major Global shock that it was almost like a reset to the system it was an opportunity for participants to discuss ways to implement new ideas that could have very well had real

advantages but would be difficult to roll out when an economy was operating at full capacity to make major modifications to a car the car is usually turned off unfortunately an economy can't normally be turned off to do the same which is why it was seen as such an opportunity the world economic Forum needs to keep its attendees interested to keep them coming and it needs important people to keep coming to stay relevant so something like the great reset was little more than clickbait for the global Elite when the the content of the Forum would be

pretty mundane discussions about economics instead of clearly explaining that the WF doubled down on something that without context sounds extremely scary and made press releases about eating bugs and owning nothing featuring an unelected world leader that is divisive at best now the people that run and attend these events are all very smart and some of them especially the politicians only have their careers because they know what will resonate well with people the great reset very clearly wouldn't so they were either so out of touch that they somehow thought this sounded appealing to regular people or

so untouchable that they just didn't care the reality is that Davos is just a boring conference that is morphed into a key event on the networking calendar where businesses and politicians know they can talk directly to one another outside of official channels it's not a mountain lair where lizard people are secretly plotting to change the world it's kind of worse it is a very well publicized event where they don't even really bother to try and hide what goes on and almost antagonistically play into the concerns that people have about what their elected and unelected leaders

are doing up on that mountain every year now if you want learn about what the great reset was supposed to do as we mentioned earlier we made a video a few years ago about that we didn't want to repeat too much here especially since it's now an out-of-date topic for the world economic Forum but you should be able to click to that on your screen now thanks for watching mate bye