"As supplements to the Davos meeting, the forum sponsors regional meetings, in Singapore or Cape Town or Washington, and Schwab had noticed that no matter what the latitude and time zone, the conversation over the last decade had been veering away from the sharply defined questions of means - How? At what price? - to a vaguely expressed questioning of ends - Why? For what purpose? He attributed the shift in emphasis to an awareness among the more thoughtful of the world's landlords that the global economy was a good deal more complicated than anybody had thought, and that in the absence of a coherent argument from the socialist left, even the most well-meaning corporate citizens found themselves marooned in a vacuum, a comfortable and well-furnished vacuum, of course, but still, unhappily, a vacuum."
I'm going to be interviewing Lapham about his visits to the 1998 and 1999 Davos meetings on the radio this afternoon - about 5:05-5:20, WBAI, 99.5 FM, NYC.
Doug