You’re All Paying Attention to the Wrong Davos
There’s no point in going to the World Economic Forum when you could be reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
Think further back.
Photographer: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFPIt’s that time of the year again — when educated people everywhere take a break from the office, disconnect their electronic devices and reread Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Pushy people might have flown to the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Switzerland and shuffled from meeting to meeting. Sophisticated people, though, prefer to lose themselves in the Davos of Mann’s imagination.
It’s not just that the novel is one of the masterpieces of literature while Davos deals in corporate boilerplate. It’s that Mann’s 1924 work still has far more to teach us about the state of today’s world than any number of politicians, central bankers and opinion leaders.