Davos 2015: Less Innovation, More Regulation, More Unrest. Run Away!

Freshly Exhumed writes: Growing income inequality was one of the top four issues at the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ranking alongside European adoption of quantitative easing and geopolitical concerns. Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion, said there was a consensus that global inequality is getting worse, fueling overriding pessimism at the gathering. The result, he said, could be that the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation. With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said. Looking at studies like NASA's HANDY and by KPMG, the UK Government Office of Science, and others, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, warns that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a "perfect storm" within about fifteen years.

Comments

Re:"They" is us

[sjames]

There is a time and place for everything, but there is no case in history where the rich kept getting richer while the poor got poorer that didn't end in pitchforks.

Not one.

There are some cases where the rich wised up long enough to placate the masses. See the New Deal.

There's a whole industry based around Elite Panic

[flarb936]

A friend of mine got into reading investment books targeted at the extremely wealthy. They were pretty funny. These books had to trump up nearly impossible end of days events and then promote investment strategies that will keep the reader amongst the 1% when half the world's population dies from a space disease delivered by a comet impact or some other highly unlikely scenario. Elite Panic is big business.

Maybe the new path to the middle class will be in selling doomsday bunkers to paranoid trillionaires.

USA used to be a country you described

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what you said:

... Virtually all of the world's top technology companies were founded in the US, most of them within the last 10-20 years as well. A lot of their founders were first to third generation Americans. Is that because Americans are overall smarter than say Scandinavians or Germans? Or maybe luckier? None of the above.

Those opportunities come from there not being a government telling you what you can't do, meaning there's no cap on your potential for economic growth ...

I am a first generation American, and since I have landed on the American soil several decades back, I have started or helped started (as sole proprietor or as partner or as investor) more than 70 companies

What you said was true, that the fact I have started over 70 companies because there wasn't anyone telling me what I can not do

I came from China, and the China during the time I left was a place where nobody had any right to start any business unless that individual had a death wish

Today's America, however, is no longer that America that I went to, some 4 decades ago

Today's America there are so many restrictions, either from the government (in terms of laws / regulation / rules) or from society ( 'gender diversity in the work place', for example )

Today I have businesses in both America and outside America, and yes, I have business in China as well --- and I can tell you this one thing ... it is much more free-ier to start and run a business in China than in America