Arriving in Davos late Sunday afternoon, my first impression (beyond a sigh of relief that there wasn't nearly as much snow and ice as I had expected) was the odd appearance of skiers coming down from the slopes walking through town with their parkas and boots still on, skis and snow boards in hand, next to many dark-suited men dragging computer bags and black roller bags, all headed to the same hotels. Checking in to my modest (Ikea-style small single beds with one pillow) digs for the week, I saw the same odd mix -- European skiers happily drinking their lagers, next to men and women (mostly men) busily reading their papers and typing on their computers in the only area of the hotel with internet.
Monday at breakfast I was distracted by the headlines of the day: the tragic airport bombing in Russia, the anticipated content of President Obama's State of the Union Address, the disparate economic recovery among the European Union member countries, the role of the internet (Facebook in particular) on the revolution and continued unrest in Tunisia. These newsbytes combined with the predictable opinion pieces on whether the WEF actually solves any problems -- or why last year 's featured economists managed to miss the impending economic meltdown in Europe -- made me think that we need more opportunities like Davos, where we are forced to stop, remove ourselves from our everyday workplaces and think together about how we can move civil society forward.
I am reminded on a daily basis that the gap between the privileged and the poor grows wider each day. Even in America, the richest country on earth, 50 million people woke up uncertain of where there next meal would come from. Buried in the paper was an announcement that two grantmakers were investing $50 million to provide basic secondary education to 5000 Kenyan children. While impressive this will only chip away at the inequities that exist worldwide where the poor are not provided with the basic knowledge necessary to find a path to success. Even in America, we have a two tier education system where the quality of your school is wholly dependent on your race and/or your zip code. And our President has to stand up in his state of the union and plead the case for the poorly educated and uninsured.
We need to focus this week's discussion here, as planned, on the economy. In doing so we must identify the innovations that narrow the gap between the rich and poor are truly the drivers that will fix this broken circumstance we face today. Worldwide, we need to unite in equipping our young -- rich and poor -- with skills and knowledge that will make them productive citizens of the world. Entrepreneurs from the emerging economies today should be our role models. Scaling innovative ideas that work is a smart strategy. History teaches us that the strongest and most sustainable economic recoveries resulted from entrepreneurs who innovations spurred the creation of new markets as well as those whose ideas provided the basic services necessary to support everyday life in a new, more efficient way.
Entrepreneurship speaks to our belief that hard work and ingenuity can lead to personal fulfillment and collective progress. Through the work we do at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) across the globe, we find that students understand this intuitively but without the knowledge and skills to apply this vision to their own lives they can't act on it. Scaling entrepreneurship education throughout the world using technology available in all sectors will allow us to dismiss the myth that successful entrepreneurs are only lucky. Every young person has the power to be successful. Let's spend time at Davos this week, figuring out how to get them the basic tools to do so.
Johann Koss and John W. McArthur: Davos 2011: Communities of Action to End Extreme Poverty
47% of all american households paid 0 federal tax in 2009
73% of federal taxes paid by the top 10% of wage earners
Meanwhile, that same 20% owns 93% of the nation's financial assets (Citation: http://www.mybudget360.com/top-1-percent-control-42-percent-of-financial-wealth-in-the-us-how-average-americans-are-lured-into-debt-servitude-by-promises-of-mega-wealth/ ) and thus can be expected to obtain about 93% of the tangible benefits of taxation at all levels - and so should be paying 93% of total taxes.
So, yeah, the system is not remotely progressive enough.
until your group is willing to look systemically at what causes these great gaps in wealth nothing much will change and charity will not cause that gap to close.
like religion I am sure all of you attending will fly back thinking you have helped solve the problem. you are working with the symptoms not the root cause of these wealth gaps.
the system the system the system is responsible for 85 to 95% of the problems in an organization and indeed a nation. few in the world understand this impact of a system on human behavior and performance..
example; look what a lobbyist system of corp money on a reelection process in america has done to american politics.
another example: look what a mega industrial military complex system has done to america's belief in on going wars to stay safe at the expense of the poor and now the middle class.
Lie and cheat small - you go to jail.
Lie and cheat big - you're rewarded and even if you fail, you fail upwards.
They really cash in by going into the revolving door - from big business to government and vice versa. Cash in and cash out.
That's doing it big so that they fail upwards.
When there is no Davos...wealth gap crisis will be solved.
Now, a real government job, that is nice. You're paid a wage you can feed yourself with, with extra so that you can save up and maybe even buy a house one day, something few private sector jobs do anymore.
And of course, compared to the private sector nowadays, any pension is fat, because there's no such thing as a pension. So getting a retirement stipend is pretty sweet.
Being in the military has all that and more, in fact. It's a fine career if you're willing to be told where to work.
For that matter, who'll pay to launch the businesses these entrepreneurs would like to start? Americans certainly can't fit the bill after 30 years of having the nation's wealthy grift us.
Never mind the billion$$ spent on social programs, prisons and so on, that try to pick up the pieces or pack them away out of sight. Poverty in others deprives us all of their potential contribution to society, whether as taxpayers & consumers with real participation in the economy or the doctors, engineers, teachers, mechanics and plumbers, yes and even and fork-lift drivers & window-cleaners that they might become, were their lives not so blighted. It's an shameful waste of human capital that impoverishes us all, but the top earners couldn't care less. They hear our pleas for the poor as sentimental bleeding-heart guilt talk. We need to talk more about the damage and loss that inequality causes to society and economy as a whole - even to big business. Countries with least inequality have the most stable and peaceful societies with high employment & education, low crime and nice facilities everywhere you look - (think Northern Europe) (not slums, favelas, ghettos and no-go urban danger zones). Equality is good for business, goddammit, not just for the poor.
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No, this is tragically wrong. Granted, skills and knowledge let people compete with each other, but the real problem is that there are simply not enough jobs. All the goods and services that the world can afford to buy and consume are already being produced without the need of everyone's labor. This is a first in human history.
And we don't need more entrepreneurs. We already suffer from too many. We don't need more dotcoms that sop up millions of dollars for their founders while employing just a handful of people. And besides, new businesses require so few people that we would need hundreds of entrepreneurs changing the world. Do you really think that's going to happen in, say, the next two, three years? Google, probably the largest, most valuable business created in the last ten years, employs only 25,000 people worldwide. We would need 200 Googles just to bring our unemployment down to a normal 5%. What are the chances of that happening?
The world will always have poor (as the bible mentions). 'Poor' is also defined very diferently across the world.
In my job I find myself several times a month driving around the poor parts of town during the work day. What I see universally refutes your contention. What I see muscular men and toned women hanging out on street corners drinking liquor all through the morning. I see them squatting on milk crates under the trees and in the shadows of buildings in the afternoons. I've delivered big screen TV's to women with no job, 5 kids, holes in the roof, trash in the yard, and no sign of useful activity. I see a lot of indolence.
On the other hand, I've also travelled in India and rural Mexico. There your characterization is accurate. In those places, our American lazies would starve to death inside a month. In those places, people work, everyone's busy, down to the guys picking through the trash looking for recyclables. In this country, people have 'less than' but nobody is poor.
Except, that is, for the mentally ill who form so much of the homeless population. That's a whole seperate level of tragedy.