The World Economic Forum (WEF)
One of the things that I have noticed as I have been researching is there is an abundance of alphabet soup. It seems like the world is run by organizations that are referred to by three to four letter acronyms. The World Economic Forum is probably one of the biggest and most influential, at least from what I have found thus far.
Image: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse found at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/davos-2020-wef-world-economic-forum-theme/
Founding of The World Economic Forum
The founder, Professor Klaus Schwab, founded the organization in January of 1971 under the original name of the European Management Forum. The name was changed to World Economic Forum in 1987. My assumption for the change in name is they wanted to broaden their scope to that of the planet rather than just Europe.
The forum is best known for their annual meeting in Davos Switzerland where global political and corporate elite are invited to discuss global issues. One of the major distinguishing attributes of the WEF is the ample amount of government participation in their operations.
The motto of the forum is to be “committed to improving the state of the world” with the purpose of being an international organization for public-private cooperation. They aim to achieve this purpose through the promotion of “stakeholder capitalism”. This essentially means that corporations are set up to benefit all the stakeholders, not just their shareholders.
A shareholder is someone who owns a share of the company whereas as a stakeholder is anyone who has interest in the performance of the company. This can be VERY broad in meaning. Pretty much everyone can be a stakeholder, from people who own part of the company, employees, communities that are effect by their operation, competitors, and even governments. I will do a separate post going a lot deeper into stakeholder theory as it is very important to understand, especially with application to the future.
Initially, the meetings were focused on economic and business-related issues. However, political leaders started being invited in 1974 and the forum began to discuss social issues as well.
Website
I highly recommend checking out their website and YouTube channel. If you actually listen to what they have to say, and you understand the implications if the world actually followed their agenda, you would understand why they have such a hilarious like-dislike ratio on their YouTube videos.
Just going to their YouTube channel and picking 3 videos at random I got a like percentage of 17.7%, 10.5%, and 6.7%. Yes, single digits for likes. Considering the average like to dislike ratio for YouTube videos in 90%, that’s pretty bad…
To student of history, this is not too surprising. There are a lot of parallels between their idea of stakeholder theory and the likes of socialism and fascism. Also, it doesn’t exactly help that they describe their platform as the “Davos Manifesto”. Granted, manifesto is defined and a declaration of objectives or intentions by an organization, but still, diction can be rather powerful.
“Davos Manifesto”
The platform of the WEF sounds nice and rosy when looked at superficially, just like pretty much every politician’s platform. Concepts like fair competition, diversity, human rights advocacy, and improving the well-being of society are all things within their platform and should definitely be strived for.
However, they propose to reach these goals through greater centralization. Apparently, the only way to improve the societal well-being is through ever increasing power of central planners. This is where a lot of problems arise. Not to mention that the centralization of power doesn’t exactly have a good track record throughout history.
Conclusions
The World Economic Forum is an international organization of global political and economic elites that are “committed to improving the state of the world” through their idea of stakeholder theory involving the centralization of power. There are people who believe they are the group that is pulling the string of a lot of corporations today. On their website you can find the list of their corporate partners, it is extensive and has a lot of the major corporations of the day.
I don’t know if I would go that far, but I definitely think this is an organization that should be paid attention to. The people that attend Davos are extremely influential. I will definitely be spending some time learning more about the organization, its history, platform , and actions.
To your wealth and future,
James Forsythe
For more important history
https://jamesdforsythe.com/category/important-history/
