Another Important Meeting

 

Beginning today business and media nabobs will gather in Singapore for the sixth annual Bloomberg New Economy Forum. 

 Built around the theme of “Embracing Instability”, the Forum will challenge and inspire global leaders to find common ground amid geopolitical stresses, economic obstacles, technological upheaval and climate change

Challenge and inspiration, that's all that's needed to pull the world out of stresses, obstacles, upheaval and change. The leaders will get together, talk it all over, and then instruct their followers on what they must do. That is, after all, the role of leaders, in their perennial role of overcoming the ignorance and ineptitude of the masses. 

No doubt a conversation between John Forbes Kerry or Henry Kissinger with their counterpart from some less blessed nation will go a long way toward remedying technological upheaval or arresting a climate change that spells the impoverishment and eventual extinction of homo sapiens. 

The real problem for these Bloomberg invitees isn't finding common ground. Instead, it's getting their own followers to believe in both the nature and dimension of the reputed problems and the proposed solutions. 

Academia identifies the problems and solutions; the media, including Bloomberg, distributes the information; governments at various levels administer and regulate the responses of businesses in eliminating the problem; the legal industry makes sure it's all done according to the rules-based order.

It has become increasingly apparent that the post-Enlightenment concept of democracy that assumes the population is capable of making meaningful and correct decisions about its future has been made obsolete by the growing complexity of the world. "Populism", allowing the whims of the miseducated masses to structure modern government and society, is so yesterday. Thus the elites of the world gather, as they now do on an almost monthly basis, in some oasis with adequate food and housing, to chatter with their contemporaries. The "first world" representatives advise changes that will have a minimal effect on their own status. The leaders of the rest make requests for funding that can be used to somehow propel them to economic equality. On return to their homelands, the leaders carry on much as they did before.