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Andrew Gowers writes every week in the Sunday Times Business section.

WHAT do you get if you take an Alpine resort, populate it for up to a week with more than 2,000 politicians and pundits, business leaders and lobbyists, celebrities and social activists, ply them with mountains of food and oceans of drink, and ask them to come up with recipes for saving the planet?

• A penetrating response to the problems and dilemmas raised by globalisation;
• A world-class, all-expenses-paid skiing opportunity;
• A chance to fill your boots with business deals while easing your social conscience;
• Enough hot air to melt the slopes.

  Yes, it’s that time of year again — when the world’s elite and those who aspire to join it, influence it, demonstrate or simply gawp, commandeer the Swiss resort of Davos and turn it briefly into a commanding height of the global economy. Or, at least, they pretend to.

  For there are always some entertaining elements of make-believe about the World Economic Forum, whose 35th annual meeting is about to unfold. I know, because I’ve been going off and on for the past 23 years, and each time the absurdity becomes just a little harder to swallow.

  Not that the event’s pulling power is in any way diminished. Far from it: Davos remains unique in its ability to attract heads of government and top business executives — not to mention a rather eccentric collection of “others”. Hollywood stars determined to make poverty history mingle in the snow with obscure clerics from the tamer sects of the Middle East. Sharon Stone discusses African orgasms with the chairman of Microsoft.

  What is hard to take is the pervading sense of flatulent self-importance. Participants — 66% male, 41% in their fifties and 70% from Europe and North America, according to a survey at last year’s meeting — just glow as they are told every five minutes that what they say or do in Davos matters for the future of the world.

  Consider the mix of pomp and platitude with which the deliberations are surrounded. The annual theme — this year The Creative Imperative — always sounds portentous, but turns out on closer examination to mean both everything and nothing. The detailed agenda never changes: “Building trust in public and private institutions”, “New mindsets and changing attitudes”, you know the sort of thing.

  And the chairmen and chief executives who flock to Davos deepen the air of sanctimony with their own bons mots in advance. Among stunning insights on the forum’s website, Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital believes that the European Union faces some key challenges such as the constitution and sustaining economic growth, and William Green of Accenture exclusively reveals that constant renewal of a business is a key element of high performance.

  Then there is the endless flattery. Ringmaster Klaus Schwab is a master of the art. A German-born academic with something of the look of a Bond villain, he created the original Davos meeting as a modest management symposium more than 30 years ago and has run it ever since as his personal circus — with a Rolodex to rival Henry Kissinger’s and a habit of being greeted everywhere with quasi-diplomatic honours.

  Thus his public persona is somewhere between game-show impresario and head of state. Forum-goers above middle-management rank are in Schwab-speak all “leaders”. Young hopefuls fresh out of college are “leaders of tomorrow”.

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