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Welcome by Mark Joseph

The final, and perhaps most daunting, component of the Everyday Antiracism framework is sharing and shifting power. I am pleased to share an essay written by Moses Ngong, a masters student at the Mandel School who has been interning with us at NIMC this year. Moses shares some profound and compelling reflections on his recent attendance of the World Economic Forum in Davos, with a particular focus on access to power.

Moses' essay is also timely because April 27th would have been our former intern Kwame Botchway's 34th birthday, and Moses was in a sense following in Kwame's footsteps with his visit to Davos. Kwame attended the World Economic Forum as one of the US Global Shaper representatives just a couple years earlier. We invite you to join us in reflecting on Kwame's impact on us and so many, and we're comforted to see young leaders like Moses take up the challenge of ethical leadership in these times when it takes particular courage to speak truth to power.

Mark

Moses' essay represents his own opinions and does not represent the views of �ǿմ�ý.

Reflections by Moses Ngong

Sitting at the Wrong Table

How a trip to Davos made me lose my faith in the current paradigm of international cooperation

, NIMC Field Placement Student

Mar 24, 2025

Since coming back from the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland (commonly referred to as “Davos”) two months ago, I’ve been trying to make sense of my feelings.

I felt the highest of highs. I connected with brilliant people from around the world in a gorgeous, opulent setting. We were entertained with free food and drinks anywhere we went, including one special appearance from Michelin-star chefs flown in from Thailand to make participants lunch. I was never more than a few feet away from a political leader, a CEO, or a celebrity, most of whom felt approachable. To engage with those at the top of their fields in a forum where they feel like equals is a gift, one of many given to me in my attendance as a . Going was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as one of—if not THE—major forums for the .01%ers of the world, it was my chance for “a seat at the table,” the framing I used to justify my place at Davos to try to advocate for change.

And yet, something felt off. Despite proclamations about the promise of stakeholder capitalism and the importance of human dignity as a universal value, it seemed that more than anything else, the heads of state and CEOs in attendance were there to advance business as usual. At public panels, those given a platform were overwhelmingly the most elite of the elite, dominated by government ministers and Ivy League-level professors. Some panels offered a place for people from different backgrounds—like myself and my peer youth delegates—to share their views, and while I’m grateful for those opportunities, they were the exception rather than the rule. I left feeling that the primary value of Davos is the chance it offers the rich and powerful to conveniently make deals in private rooms instead of advancing civic dialogue to address the world’s most pressing issues.

Closed-door dealing among the already well-connected is an odd reason to have an international forum, especially given the challenges we face. , despite an exponential uptake in green power. Income inequality in many Western countries is astounding, and we appear to be naïve about just how much socioeconomic mobility we have. AI is receiving 10x the investment of the Manhattan Project, with no intergovernmental cooperation guiding its development. That is not to mention the dramatic issues that confront the Global South, including , the aforementioned climate change, and a lack of domestically driven economic development, all made worse by the increasingly explicit influence of international oligarchs.

Billionaires threaten democracies as their wealth and overwhelming influence , if not (both in the U.S. and ). Social media platforms and tech companies are bought out by loyalists or as they worsen the lives of people who use them, .

These circumstances demand international forums that name and address these issues. Platforms that invite stakeholders to the table with a pragmatic moral purpose: global progress that uplifts the least among us and protects the planet.

That platform isn’t Davos. Realizing that now, I’m unsure I was sitting at the right table.

Empty Words, Empty Promises

An entity like the World Economic Forum (WEF) could be a powerful convener bringing together businesses and nations to concretely address international forces like climate change, AI, and the possibility of another pandemic. There’s a real need to foster international cooperation to mitigate such threats. However, complex problems like these can only be teased out in a forum where people can have nuanced, substantive conversations driven by a commitment to social progress that reimagines success. Unfortunately, Davos does not facilitate this kind of dialogue.

At the Annual Meeting, the default for dialogue is a panel. These are often 1-4 presenters having what feel like safe, almost scripted conversations about the topics at hand, which run the gamut from AI to Urban Planning. Q&A is usually limited, and it often isn't even allowed for the most important political figures. For example, a panel I attended with the foreign secretary for the Palestinian Authority abruptly ended after a thirty-minute conversation.

When people do get the chance to ask great questions that challenge the status quo, there isn’t enough time to give substantive answers. When one of my friends asked a brilliant question about decoupling economic growth from resource exploitation and carbon emissions at a panel, there were only a few minutes for panelists to respond. Of those, only one gave a considered, half-nuanced answer (funnily enough, the Saudi Arabia Minister of Economy!). In a conference with such brilliant attendees, many of whom have extensive knowledge on the subjects of the panels, longer conversations with more substantial Q&A could draw out more wisdom from participants and panelists alike. But part of the reason Davos doesn’t invite this kind of conversation is because the background of many attendees is suspect.

Attendees at Davos can be morally problematic because there are very few demands of those who attend the conference. Beyond an exorbitant ~$40k ticket price, there are hardly any expectations of the organizations that attend. But why shouldn’t there be? What if a business had to commit to being carbon-neutral by 2035 to attend Davos? Or pay workers around the world a decent wage for their country, enough to . Deciding what standards should apply to nations would be trickier, but the UN’s is a helpful start.

In fairness, it would be a significant challenge for WEF to introduce more values/expectations into the space. Determining what “good” is in local politics is complex, and that task becomes exponentially more difficult internationally. Further, nations and businesses attend Davos because of the implicit promise of an increase in fortune, and considering workers and the environment isn’t a priority for the global capitalist order.

What has been a priority for those interested in traditional development is GDP, a sort of international north star for progress. Though it has been used for almost a century to indicate prosperity, it is a problematic indicator for success. In The Divide, economist Jason Hickel points out that increasing GDP no longer correlates with increasing happiness in Western countries. Costa Rica has a higher life expectancy than the US with 20% of its GDP. As Senator Robert Kennedy said, “{GDP} measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Ultimately, we’re in a moment that demands international dialogue more than ever, but it must be substantive, guided by principled actors, and reconsider what success means. Davos participants should have a clear focus on how to lift up their constituent citizens, customers, and workers instead of pursuing business as usual, affirming a dysfunctional status quo in the process.

Good Intentions, Coopted

Sadly, the status quo is seductive. One of the more memorable conversations I had was with a woman I met at a dinner party working in the “social impact” space. She convincingly described the vision of her work: a world where rich people had to drink the same water or breathe the same air as poor people, compelled to protect those public goods. I was surprised but encouraged to encounter someone who seemingly shared my values so early in the conference.

When I asked her what she was working on to address that issue, I was equally surprised by what she told me her piece of the solution was: an AI-powered platform for people to buy small businesses. I couldn’t see how she got from A to B, but for her, it is a sincere attempt to build a better world.

She wasn’t the only one I met who had a similar perspective. I met a real-estate mogul who considered being on panels at Davos as “community service,” seemingly unaware of the ultra-elite community he was “serving.” One brilliant, charming peer told me about his social impact work at a start-up that was given $100 million to revive the Wooly Mammoth. It was painful to see all of these seemingly decent, brilliant people who believed that they were doing good for the world by putting their labor into corporatized solutions to problems that corporate and consumerist cultures created.

This issue isn’t unique to folks at Davos. The talented people who work in ESG/DEI at major corporations also care deeply about doing good, but I believe their good intentions have been coopted by systems that cause much social harm. Most corporations use those umbrella acronyms to improve their image but . Those who continue to invest in ESG/DEI are doing so as a tiny part of their work, and even those actions often . ESG cannot mitigate the damage done to the environment and people’s bodies through corporate production, where a cheap good in the United States means an exploited worker somewhere else in the world.

All of this is to say that the current economic system—and the corporations lording over it—takes intelligent, decent people who want to do good and gives them jobs with enough prestige and pay to make them look past the harmful practices that the rest of the business advances.

Reflecting on my time at Davos, I realized that my “seat at the table” was powerless; it could not compare to the overwhelming influence of corporations and nations embracing a harmful paradigm of economic progress. My seat wouldn’t change how Davos worked; if anything, sitting at someone else’s table, with their rules, and yes, with Michelin star meals, I don’t think I could resist the temptation to become part of their family.

But I don’t believe the way things work today is good enough. I don’t want to be complicit in a regime of exploitation and environmental destruction where the actors responsible for that harm are given a platform where they cannot be effectively questioned and are allowed to advance business as usual.

I want to be at a table that imagines a better world. Where people who are genuinely doing good work are well paid, respected by their peers, and get to share their practices with nations and businesses who commit to a new vision of progress.

I think we need to build our own table.

Please consider to read the follow-up to this piece when it’s released. Thank you to my friends Ben Dormus and Gilberto Morishaw for their insights and advice as I wrote this piece.