The Davos Discourse, and How I Hope It Changes

Reflections of a Pinholder

On what occasions does one wear this?

Off the top of my head I can think of three types of people who receive small physical objects to commemorate that they’ve been plugging away at the same thing for quite a while:

1. Employees at large legacy companies.

2. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

3. Participants in the World Economic Forum’s expert network who have attended the annual meeting in Davos at least ten times.

I got my Davos ten-year pin last week.

I got invited to the annual meeting for the first time as machine learning was becoming an unignorable phenomenon, lending support to the “second machine age” argument that Erik Brynjolfsson and I had just published a book on. I kept getting invited back because rapid and often surprising technological progress kept happening (Hi, DeepSeek!). And, I think, because I got a reputation as a moderator who ended sessions on time and accomplished the task - often difficult at Davos - of shutting down the long-winded without giving too much offense.¹

Anyway, I'm a ten-timer now. And I've gotten a lot out of attending the annual meetings. An ego boost for one thing. Let's not pretend that we humans don't enjoy prestige,² or that a Davos white badge doesn't confer some of it to those of us who think and write about how the world is changing³ (my acronym for such folk is GASPs: global alleged smart persons). I've also met fantastic people, learned a lot, and had some good times.

From Cartoon Captions to the Congress Centre

But I've also found myself growing increasingly frustrated over the years at the Davos Discourse. I’m using “discourse” in the Foucauldian sense: “a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience” as Wikipedia puts it.⁴ I've been involved in a hundred-ish separate instances of this discourse — a hundred-ish sessions inside and outside the Congress Centre. The sessions I attend tend to be focused on some combination of technological progress, economic growth, and human and planetary flourishing — rather than, say, prospects for peace in the Middle East — but my guess is that my sessions are broadly representative of the overall Davos discourse. So what’s my frustration with it?

Let me answer with an apparent non sequitur: For a century, The New Yorker magazine has included cartoons. I cut my teeth on them, eventually got them, and have enjoyed them ever since.

It hurt to learn, then, that many younger people find them twee, narrow, repetitive, and generally unfunny. A couple folk have exposed these qualities by proposing universal New Yorker cartoon captions: ones that work no matter what the cartoon is. The first of these was “Christ, what an asshole!”, which makes up in universality what it lacks in subtlety. The second, conceptually similar but more family-friendly, is “What a misunderstanding!” The most recent and most brilliant is “Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

My frustration with the Davos Discourse is that I think there's a universal title for every session at the Annual Meeting. It is "How Can We Further Distribute Power to Hold Things Up?"

How can we bring more stakeholders to the table? How can we enhance oversight and governance of emerging technologies? How can we rein in the excesses of the private sector? How can be more inclusive, and ensure that prosperity is justly and equitably distributed? How, in short, can we get more cooks into the kitchen?

I Beg You to Stop Begging the Question

My frustration with these questions is that they beg the question of why isn’t the world a better place? They assume the following answer to that question: what's messing up the world is an insufficient number of checks and balances, rather than an excess of them.

I don't share that assumption. It holds sometimes, of course. But not always. In many important cases what’s keeping us from making progress are overconstrained systems, rather than underconstrained actors. Sometimes, in other words, excess autonomy isn’t the problem; vetocracy is, to use Francis Fukuyama’s great term.

My friend Jennifer Pahlka has been doing a spectacular job describing how within governments good intentions so often turn into terrible implementations. Her book Recoding America and Eating Policy Substack are required reading for anyone who wants to understand how legacy, risk aversion, and proceduralism combine to preserve the status quo and thwart reform. Pahlka has devoted a good chunk of her adult life to these reforms, and (unless I misread her badly) she doesn't think that further distributing the power to hold them up is a good idea.

Another great term in addition to vetocracy is "accountability sinks," coined by economist Dan Davies and explained in his book The Unaccountability Machine. These are systems designed (I believe both consciously and subconsciously) to remove personal accountability from outcomes - especially bad ones. One obvious way to accomplish this is to make sure that so many people are involved in a decision that it's pointless to try to pin anybody down.

As the work of Pahlka and Davies demonstrates, there's a counter to the Davos discourse taking shape at present. The roots of this counter-discourse go back at least as far as Balzac's writing about bureaucracy, which he called “a giant machinery operated by dwarves” and “a heavy curtain drawn between the right thing to do and the right man to do it.”

Counters to the Davos discourse are part of the recent Progress Studies, Roots of Progress, and Abundance movements. They’re also being advanced and put into practice by tech founders and investors including Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Reed Hastings, Joe Lonsdale, Peter Theil, Steve Jurvetson, Eric Schmidt, Patrick Collison Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk. My book The Geek Way spends a fair amount of time describing how these and other innovators are trying to build organizations that don't turn into vetocracies, and why this work is so important. I've also written a fair bit on the topic in previous posts here.

I hope this counter-discourse makes it to Davos soon. I look forward to the day when I read the agenda for the upcoming annual meeting of the World Economic Forum and see that my universal session title no longer makes sense.

1. Or maybe because I didn't care if I gave offense.

2. Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson took the brave step of baldly acknowledging this fact in their dynamite book The Elephant in the Brain: “To put it baldly, we want to impress you; we’re seeking prestige.” So are the rest of us authors.

3. Did I like it when John Thornhill referred to me and Erik in the Financial Times as “the pin-up boys of the Davos crowd?” I confess that I did.

4. And I’m using “Foucauldian” to show how widely read I am, spelling it with a “d” to signal that I’m a bit of a francophone, and citing Wikipedia to make clear that I’m a cosmopolite with the common touch.