Denial in Davos
When Wealth Becomes a Weapon
This week, the usual caravan of presidents, prime ministers, technocrats and corporate courtiers has migrated to Davos. Once again they will speak, with great solemnity, about “global risks” – the weather, the biosphere, the fraying of social fabrics, the need to crack down on terrorism, and the latest digital sorcery that terrifies them. They will do all of this, as they usually do, without naming the one organising principle that binds these crises into a coherent pattern: the economic creed under which they themselves prosper.
Neoliberal capitalism – industrial economism in its late, predatory phase – is the invisible guest at Davos. It structures the conversation while remaining cautiously unspoken. To utter the word “capitalism” in that context is to risk turning the mirror back on those who fund the forum, chair the sessions, and glide between private jets and panel discussions about sustainability.
The current variant of capitalism is not simply about markets and entrepreneurial flair. It is the long, calculated transfer of power and resources from the commons to private balance sheets: the systematic sale of public assets; the dilution of workers’ bargaining power; the engineering of tax systems that flatter capital and discipline labour. The ideological veneer is familiar: individual merit, competitive efficiency, the sacralisation of “the entrepreneur” as civilisation’s ultimate benefactor. Underneath that story, wealth is drawn upward like groundwater pumped from an already stressed aquifer, leaving the many to inhabit the sinkholes.
In most countries that once experimented with some form of mixed economy, this shift has concentrated wealth at the apex of society with such intensity that political representation itself is being hollowed out. When money coalesces at the top, laws and institutions follow. Democracies become pure theatre – carefully curated rituals masking the fact that vital decisions are made elsewhere, by people for whom elections are, at most, an inconvenience.
The World Economic Forum’s own Global Risks Report for 2026 is almost a case study in this evasion. Their experts dutifully rank the dangers: geopolitical confrontation, disinformation, polarisation in the short term; extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and systemic damage to Earth systems over a decade. Economic inequality appears, but in a curiously anaesthetised form. It is framed as resentment – citizens feeling excluded, frustrated by stalled mobility. As if the fundamental issue were emotional discomfort rather than the architecture of appropriation.
Inequality is not, at its core, a psychological state. It’s a question of how the fruits of our collective labour are apportioned, and who acquires enduring authority over the conditions of life. Wealth is rarely the solitary triumph of individual talent. It’s the surface expression of a far more intricate ecology of contributions: carers, educators, parents, clinicians, cleaners, engineers, farmers, administrators, street cleaners, public servants – many underpaid, often exhausted – whose effort makes it possible for profits to be booked and dividends to be paid.
Even the most celebrated fortunes depend on foundations they didn’t build: public infrastructure, shared knowledge systems, ecological stability, social trust. Remove any one of these, and the glamorous edifice of “success” quickly looks contingent, even accidental. Yet the prevailing ideology insists that those at the summit are, in some essential sense, worth more. That insistence is not innocent. It justifies laws and norms that allow a tiny fraction of humanity to extract value from the rest while contributing proportionately less back to the commonwealth.
Over recent decades, that fraction has grown fabulously rich. Tax regimes have been redesigned so that income from labour is routinely treated more harshly than income from capital. The very rich can arrange their affairs – perfectly “legally” in many jurisdictions – so that their contributions to public revenue are vanishingly small. It should surprise nobody that people are increasingly angered by this. Nor should we be puzzled that anger is easily re-routed by demagogues towards scapegoats who possess little wealth and even less power.
Work in political philosophy and critical economics over the past decade has advanced the concept of “limitarianism” – the claim that extreme concentrations of wealth are not just repugnant, but actively damaging to social, ecological and political life. Drawing on that scholarship, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid a simple conclusion: as the number of billionaires grows, the surrounding landscape of systemic “collateral damage” also thickens.
Vast fortunes are not inert. They buy disproportionate leverage over lawmaking, over public narratives, over the direction of science and technology, over land and water, and over the horizon of possibilities we quietly hand to our children. They underwrite every business model that treats the living world as a disposable input. They reshape public priorities so that threats to our continued existence are rebadged as “growth sectors” and “innovation frontiers”, rather than warnings that the prevailing economic script itself has gone rogue.
To grasp this, one needs to look not just at individual fortunes but at the operating system of the global economy. Scholars across history, economics and archaeology are increasingly asking whether societies that tolerate extreme wealth concentration for too long are, in effect, scripting their own demise. Historical analyses of previous civilisations – from imperial Rome to dynastic China and beyond – suggest that when elites cease to act as stewards and instead become extractive rentiers, the social fabric eventually tears. Sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly. The symptoms are familiar: institutional decay, ecological overshoot, spirals of violence, and finally collapse or radical reconfiguration.
Today’s global capitalism is not exempt from such dynamics. If anything, its planetary reach multiplies the consequences. When a single economic worldview, premised on endless extraction and growth, overlays almost every culture on Earth, the margin for error narrows dramatically. If that worldview is failing, there’s nowhere else to retreat.
Davos, however, is not designed to ask whether the worldview itself is defective. Its gatherings operate more like a secular liturgy for industrial economism. The Global Risks Report, for example, manages to discuss the world’s dangers without once naming capitalism, socialism, social democracy, or any alternative systemic frame. It’s as if the economic order were a fact of nature, like gravity, rather than a human invention open to revision.
This silence isn’t accidental. And in spite of pleas to tax wealth more effectively, the individuals and institutions who convene at Davos are the principal beneficiaries of the current arrangement. Their legitimacy, status and wealth rest on the presumption that neoliberal capitalism is not only efficient but morally superior; that its evident harms are unfortunate side-effects to be “managed” rather than symptoms of deeper design flaws. To question the system in any serious way would be to invite a more intimate inquiry: how did I acquire my wealth? Whose work, whose lands, whose futures made it possible? At what point does my portfolio become part of the problem?
Behind the scenes, a sophisticated “wealth defence industry” has emerged to ensure that such questions never gain too much traction. Legions of lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, asset managers and public relations experts devote their days to protecting assets at the summit of the wealth pyramid. Their craft is to translate private interest into public language: “stability”, “innovation”, “job creation”, “philanthropy”. To a remarkable extent, they have succeeded in equating the health of the system with the comfort of its winners.
Which brings us to an uncomfortable truth. If the economic order exists to enable all people to live meaningful lives in just societies, within the ecological thresholds of a finite planet, then neoliberal capitalism is failing abysmally. One needn’t be a socialist, or a devotee of any particular doctrine, to see that an arrangement which systematically degrades its life-support systems while enshrining extreme inequality as the norm is not “sustainable” in any serious sense of that word.
The more interesting inquiry, perhaps, is why so many of us, not only at the apex but right across the society, cling to its promises. What is it about this particular story – that competition is the purest expression of freedom, that winners deserve more and more, that nature is a warehouse of raw materials to be plundered – that’s captured our imagination so utterly? And what might dislodge it?
In 2019 Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian whose work engages deeply with economic inequality, made headlines in Davos by directly challenging a panel of billionaires and executives. He insisted that real solutions to inequality required taxing the super-rich properly – calling out their use of loopholes and offshore havens – and accused them of hypocrisy for discussing poverty without addressing their own tax avoidance. Since then the courage to invite such heresies has subsided.
If gatherings like Davos remain unwilling even to name the organising principles they serve, they’re not going to help us answer those questions. Their rituals will continue: exalted speeches, curated panels, carefully worded communiqués about inclusion and resilience. Meanwhile, the underlying logic – extraction without real accountability, wealth without comparable responsibility, growth without inclusion – proceeds unchecked.
At some point, the refusal to interrogate the system becomes complicity in its consequences. That is the threshold at which genuine leadership diverges from elite performance. Leadership, in the sense that matters to our species and to the Earth, isn’t the art of preserving privilege under the guise of improvement. It’s the collective courage to reimagine how we live, trade, govern and care for one another; to ask questions that make even the most comfortable among us uneasy.
The economic elites who gather in Davos have both the power and the information to know that extreme wealth concentration is a central driver of the risks they profess to manage. For the moment, they largely choose not to know it, at least not publicly. To admit as much would mean confronting a bleak prospect: that their own fortunes, and the system that sustains them, are no longer compatible with a viable future for the many.
But that’s the conversation missing in Davos. And until it begins in earnest, the world’s most influential risk managers will remain, in effect, risk amplifiers – curators of a failing narrative, presiding over its denouement while insisting that there is, really, no alternative.