The key insight of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel prize-winning economist, was that useful information is decentralised. Localities, regions and countries are shaped by their own institutions and cultures. Individuals, families and companies understand their needs better than some distant technocrat.

Such humility is in short supply at Davos, where Klaus Schwab opened by asking attendees what global elites needed to “master the future” of overlapping crises. The founder of the World Economic Forum answered himself, dreaming of a “platform where all stakeholders of global society are engaged”.

By “stakeholders”, I doubt Schwab meant Joe Public. You and I were not on one of the thousand private aircraft shuttling attendees to the conference for the apparent purpose of, for instance, bemoaning climate change. No, the “we” that Davos man usually refers to are the politicians, chief executives and international functionaries attending the retreat in the Swiss Alps. It’s this exclusivity, alongside loose talk of global mastery, that makes the conference a lightning rod for conspiracy theories.

The World Economic Forum is not, of course, a secret cabal creating a new world order, nor a paedophile ring trying to enslave us, as some whackos claim. Davos is really a corporatist talking shop, with no formal policy power. Hubristic business chiefs, politicians and bureaucrats sit around spitballing “global solutions” to various challenges. Their unifying idea is that by working together, business and government elites can adjust the world’s path towards progressive goals.

Left-wing critics of the economic forum seem to misunderstand this underpinning, confusing it with a free-market organisation. Most attendees certainly favour international trade and see corporations as a force for good, but it does not push “neoliberalism”, as many claim. Schwab himself has attacked “free-market fundamentalism” as having “eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and [produced] ruinous tax competition”.

Attacks on the World Economic Forum by “national conservatives” are similarly muddled. They oppose elites who advocate giving up national sovereignty for global governance. Yet, substantively, they, too, want corporatist economics, albeit at the national level. In the United States, national conservatives are readily embracing trade protectionism and industrial strategies — the same idea of governments working with selected businesses to deliver missions.

Sadly, in our simplistic, polarised narratives, to be anti-Davos is to risk being associated with either trumped-up conspiracies or Trumpist economics. But there’s also a liberal case against the forum. Its corporatist ideology is a recipe for top-down regulation and government favouritism. Even if the conference itself has little effect on policy, Schwab’s idea that global stakeholder partnerships of business and government elites are a governing ideal should be rubbished.

These elites have no special insight as to future global challenges. In 2007, the forum’s chief concern was bird flu, just before a banking and financial crisis took hold. Its 2021 risk assessment largely ignored inflation, but listed “digital inequality” as a worry. More substantively, its endless calls for “global co-operation” for today’s “polycrisis” of inflation, climate change and more falls foul of Hayek’s insight. It’s arrogant to believe those attending can steer eight billion people in a £90 trillion global economy towards better outcomes.

Indeed, one virtue of a market economy is that it delivers many bottom-up solutions to problems, tailored to individual and local circumstances. In contrast, any one-size-fits-all “solution” thrashed out by distant stakeholders risks making many worse off while entrenching new systemic risks across the globe.

True, certain problems, such as climate change, inevitably require international co-operation. Even then, the Davos instinct that big global companies, environmentalists and politicians can hash it out in a metaverse “global co-operation village” is a recipe for the worst type of crony capitalism.

How many of the hundreds of millions of small businesses that would be affected by the proposed green “industrial transformation” globally had their voice heard this week? Very few. Employees of the rest might catch a glimpse of the attendees’ aircraft as they fly home.