Superclass

Gathering in Davos

Every year, 2,000 of the world’s most influential business leaders, government officials, cultural figures and media barons meet in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. Since 1971, acknowledged leaders from many fields have descended on Davos to conduct business and attend presentations in a wintry social setting. These worldly citizens – a cross section of the planet’s “superclass” – share a vision extending beyond national boundaries into the global realm.

In 1956, in a book titled The Power Elite, Columbia University professor C. Wright Mills noted the growing phenomenon of power being concentrated among elite people. Mills identified a group of “deciders” in American corporations, politics and military life, people who shaped policies in business, government and national security. In 1957, in an event that marked an evolution in the consolidation of postwar power, the Treaty of Rome first outlined a European Common Market. The signatory nations’ goal was to fend off war and thwart communism.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower acknowledged this consolidation of power in a 1961 speech warning of a “military-industrial complex...