La montagne des vanités

by Lewis H. Lapham

Welcome to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "five days and six nights of rarefied discussion attended by at least 2,000 gratifyingly important people from 150 countries," with "heads of state, finance ministers, policy intellectuals, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, corporate executives as thick upon the ground as pine needles." Among the 1998 Bill Gates, George Soros, Newt Gingrich, and Helmut Kohl (who, in his opening remarks, informs his audience that the euro is coming and they'd better get used to it, citing the leadership example of his mother, "a marvelous woman, as wise as she was strong-minded, who taught her children to eat the meals placed in front of them on the kitchen table without sniveling objection"). Your guide to this congregation of the international plutocracy is Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, and although he occasionally finds himself "at a loss to know which late-afternoon briefings to attend, the one about El Niño or the one about robots," he manages to put the hype surrounding the global economy into a darkly humorous perspective worthy of comparison to Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad . In addition to his itinerary during the 1998 Davos summit, Lapham also provides an account of a later economic conference held in New York, which also serves as a recap of the extremely volatile year, and a dictionary of received ideas wherein we learn, to pick one example, that bureaucrats are "Enemies of Free Enterprise. No bureaucrat knows what it means to meet a payroll or take a risk. Europe has too many of them."

Genres: Economics

Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Lewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.

Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

Reviews

[Thomas Griffin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth reading for a few snippets of commentary which are particularly provoking. Especially now 25 years have passed, the commentary evokes an eerie hindsight for the modern reader.

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short bulletin from a talented writer that packs a punch from the heart of darkness - the World Economic Forum pre-Seattle ‘99.

“Because the meeting in Davos represented a quorum of investors rather than an assembly of citizens, and because the advantages implicit in the euro clearly would accrue to the accounts of large businesses and the central banks, it was no surprise that sentiment in its favor heavily outweighed the expressions of suspicion or mistrust.”

[Jacob Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brisk and witty piece of reportage from the commanding heights of global capitalism at the turn of the millennia. Lapham writes with the erudition and trained tones of cynicism that can be expected from him, but the book doesn't overstay its welcome.

[Tom G · Rating 4 out of 5]

a blisteringly sarcastic account of the 27th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum that also surveys the failures of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. entertaining and thought provoking

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Lewis Lapham, a well-rounded snark artist on the same page (and circle of hell) as Gore Vidal. Here is his experience among the neoliberals and blutocrats at Davos.

[YZ]

On Amtrak.