History marches past Davos

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) convenes in Davos under the banner “A Spirit of Dialogue”, the United States (US) has seized control of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, installing what President Donald Trump calls an “indefinite” American administration of the country’s petroleum reserves, while blackmailing European countries over his demand for Greenland.

- MARIANA MAZZUCATO

The disconnect between the WEF’s call for dialogue and America’s unilateral aggression is jarring, to say the least.US intervention in Latin America may be taking new forms, but the seizure of oil infrastructure echoes past resource grabs. While Davos attendees parse the nuances of stakeholder capitalism, the old rules of power politics and resource extraction are being unleashed anew.

In 2019, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman cut through the Davos spectacle with surgical precision: “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bull****.” With those eight words, he exposed the gap between rhetoric and reality, between the language of shared prosperity and the practice of wealth concentration.

Of course, companies should pay their fair tax bill. But beyond this, we also need to look at how value is created in the first place — not just redistribution but also predistribution. The latter is about restructuring how value is created and shared from the outset, not merely redistributing crumbs after value is extracted, and requires forging new social contracts with concrete conditions and accountability. That is why modern industrial strategy should be organised around missions: Specific, measurable goals that address societal challenges while catalysing innovation and investment across sectors.