Society

The gayest Davos in history still isn’t gay enough

20 Jan 2020

Adding an LGBTQ panel to the annual outing and giving an award to a transgender artist beats the “don’t ask, don’t tell” posture of the past. But with 70 countries still persecuting same-sex relations, and many WEF corporate sponsors supportive of equality, more can be done.

Guest view: Extinction Rebellion, finance’s friend

20 Jan 2020

The radical UK climate movement may sound like the corporate sector’s last idea of a kindred spirit. But spokesperson Rupert Read argues its focus on fast, deep carbon reductions are simple common sense, for financiers too. That’s why he is in Davos this week.

Royal couple test House of Windsor revolving door

9 Jan 2020

Harry and Meghan’s plan to step back seems a financial no-brainer: the pair’s commercial opportunities far exceed their small state income. Like ex-politicians in business, though, success derives from close ties to former public life. That means keeping Buckingham Palace sweet.

Guest view: Cities are $24 trln green opportunity

17 Dec 2019

Metropolises account for 70% of global carbon emissions. That puts them at the forefront of the battle to keep global warming to a minimum, argues Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief behind the 2015 Paris accords. But cities cannot do it alone.

Review: The billionaire doth protest too much

13 Dec 2019

It’s hard out there for the mega-rich – they are being asked to pay up and check their privilege. Enter a new subgenre: the defensive billionaire bio. Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts is the latest to claim – only somewhat convincingly – that hard work explains almost everything.

Ugly Uber data is first step tackling ugly problem

6 Dec 2019

The ride-sharing firm said over 3,000 sexual assaults and nine fatal attacks were reported during 1.3 bln U.S. trips last year. The numbers are small in context, but still shocking. By publishing the data, boss Dara Khosrowshahi is at least showing he wants Uber to become safer.

Tech cartel would be handy for U.S. housing

19 Nov 2019

Apple, Facebook and Google have pledged a total of $4.5 bln to build homes in the San Francisco area. California needs at least 200 times that amount. Silicon Valley firms get criticized for being too big, but this is one area where they could throw their weight around more.

Review: Nobel winners show limits of their method

15 Nov 2019

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo like small details and big global comparisons. In “Good Economics for Hard Times”, this year’s laureates make mostly unsurprising proposals. Still, they’re right to pay more attention to actual behaviour, and to distrust too-free markets.

The Exchange: Duflo and Banerjee

12 Nov 2019

This year’s Nobel economists showed that people often do the opposite of what theory predicts – whether they’re in a Kenyan schoolroom or a dying U.S. factory town. Here, two of the winning trio explain their method, and what happens when researchers leave intuition at the door.

Bolivia’s president snared by his own success

11 Nov 2019

Evo Morales stepped aside after weeks of protests over vote-rigging claims. Growing the country’s middle class helped him score three terms. But with democratic norms under threat, that same precarious class may have stopped him from getting a fourth.

Review: #MeToo comes out of the shadows

25 Oct 2019

The casting couch is a Hollywood trope, but it's real for many women. Yet exposing their mistreatment is daunting, and not just because it requires courage. Two books about the fall of media mogul Harvey Weinstein show the insidious role of legal agreements that muzzle victims.

Macri’s likely defeat a warning to LatAm reformers

25 Oct 2019

Argentines are expected to oust would-be reformer Mauricio Macri in Sunday’s elections, which follow weeks of violent protests across the region. In the post-commodity-boom era, Latin American reformers need to find a new identity that is neither leftist nor too austere.

India’s pricey truffles leave a bitter aftertaste

25 Oct 2019

Mumbai-listed ITC has unveiled the world’s costliest chocolate. It’s a bonbon-shaped reminder of India’s growing millionaire club. Overall wealth is increasing more slowly, though. With pocketbook protests heating up globally, it’s a bad time for that chasm to widen further.

Tech riches bypass San Francisco African-Americans

22 Oct 2019

The city is bursting with billionaires and boasts a jobless rate of just 2.3%. Yet black residents’ median annual incomes are only a quarter of what whites take home. Many factors are to blame, but Silicon Valley could do much more to reduce the inequities.

The clock is ticking on TikTok’s U.S. business

21 Oct 2019

A senator wants parents to delete the popular video app owned by China’s ByteDance. Even Facebook is taking potshots. TikTok, meanwhile, is building lobbying strength in Washington. But the mood in D.C. is ripe for curbs on any Chinese upstart with global ambitions.

Canada’s election could bring climate-change chill

18 Oct 2019

Even if Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party loses to Conservatives next week, his national carbon tax looks safe. Yet the rate is too low, and unlikely to get tougher. Having a big, pollution-happy neighbor doesn’t help. Canada’s green wave may be reaching its political limits.

Opioid crisis pile-on reaches legal critical mass

17 Oct 2019

The imminent start of a key trial has precipitated $50 billion of combined settlement offers from U.S. companies. Drugmakers and distributors prefer one-off payouts to open-ended uncertainty, while localities want cash as soon as possible. That’s a recipe for deals.

Facebook would be wise to just give up on politics

15 Oct 2019

Over the past 90 days, political ads brought in less than 1% of forecast Q3 sales. But after presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren showed up Facebook’s patchy vetting, they continue to garner way more in the way of negative vibes. Mark Zuckerberg can afford to exit the category.

Google could buff its browser-privacy blemishes

11 Oct 2019

Chrome’s owner lags both Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari in trying to make the web less creepy. The prospect of losing revenue may explain Google’s resistance to blocking certain ad trackers. If more users abandon the web’s most popular browser, Google is likely to act.

Tech firms show usefulness in the face of tragedy

10 Oct 2019

Twitter, Facebook and others worked together to remove footage of a gunman who attacked a German synagogue. Social media is a potential channel for extremism, and Silicon Valley is making amends for past slow responses. This at least helps their claim to be part of the solution.