“Without some way of distinguishing real change from cheap talk, cynics will continue to see [the WEF] as a grand exercise in hypocrisy. Or, perhaps, an excuse for governments not to do their job, because, hey, I was at Davos and the private sector told me they’ve got it all taken care of. The remaking of capitalism is an important and fragile undertaking, because it is hard to be the nice guy if your competitor is still playing by the old rules. That’s why, without some carrots and sticks, stakeholder capitalism will always be at risk of being a fad, an appeasement, as opposed to the deeper transformation it might become.”
Tim Wu, New York Times

“It’s hard to see how [the current] pace of earnings growth — and the return from stocks by extension — is sustainable if companies decide that shareholders are no longer their only concern. Sure, some efforts to broaden the base of stakeholders may contribute to future growth, or at least not detract from it. Germany, for example, has a decades-old tradition of co-determination in which workers are represented on corporate boards, and German companies have generated higher earnings growth than their U.S. counterparts since Germany enacted co-determination in 1976…

“But the scale of the problems contemplated at Davos this week is likely to require more drastic intervention… There will be no shortage of observers calling the gathering at Davos an empty gesture this week, but the billionaires are right about one thing: Ignoring inequality and climate change is no longer an option. Now let’s see who’s willing to pay for it.”
Nir Kaisser, Bloomberg Opinion

The harsher critics posit that, “Quite often, and certainly when Trump first entered the White House, the tension between him and the Davos crowd was pitched as a great first-principles clash between reactionary nationalism and multicultural globalism. But in truth, this was largely a war between intellectual fads — one that hid a far more important commonality between Trump and the Davos set. Namely, both sides share a basic assumption that business leaders and wealthy investors (which of course includes the Davos elites themselves) are the most important and valuable participants in economic life…

“The Davos crowd may grate at Trump's nationalist rhetoric; they may be horrified by his reactionary cultural stances; they may even disagree with him on climate change. But at the end of the day, they know who will defend their place atop the mountain.”
Jeff Spross, The Week

Regarding the Treasury Secretary’s comment about Greta Thumberg, “A good question for Mnuchin and other Republican Party policymakers probably is: Why don’t you listen to what economists have to say about climate change… For economists, the gold standard of climate policy continues to be the idea of taxing carbon dioxide emissions. That was the point of a January 2019 letter signed by thousands of PhD-wielding economists, including more than two dozen Nobel laureates, all four living former Federal Reserve chairs, and Treasury secretaries and Council of Economic Advisers chairs from both parties…

“If you are going to run around the world lecturing people about the need to take economics classes, you should familiarize yourself with the baseline consensus in the economics profession…

“It would genuinely be an incredibly constructive step for Mnuchin and other GOP leaders to do what they’re suggesting Thunberg to do — listen to economists and espouse moderately aggressive, market-oriented solutions to the climate problem… instead, the current government is doing less than nothing to reduce emissions, even as it smugly lectures others about the need to listen to experts.”
Matthew Yglesias, Vox