It is the time of year when the air in the Swiss Alps becomes thick with the scent of private jet fuel and unearned moral superiority. Welcome to Davos, the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum, where the architects of our collective doom meet to express their profound, furrowed-brow concern about the state of the world they have so meticulously dismantled for profit. To call it a conference is a generous euphemism; it is a secular pilgrimage for the high priests of neoliberalism, a place where the people who benefit most from global instability gather to reassure one another that they are, in fact, the only ones capable of fixing it.

This year’s ‘Global Risks Report’ is the usual laundry list of terrors: climate change, misinformation, AI-driven job loss, and the ever-looming threat of social collapse. It is a fascinating document, primarily because it reads like a confession written in the third person. They talk about these threats as if they are meteorites hurtling toward Earth, rather than the logical, inevitable outcomes of the very economic systems they protect with the ferocity of a cornered badger. They discuss 'rebuilding trust' while operating from a mountain fortress that requires more security than a nuclear silo, seemingly oblivious to the fact that trust is not something you rebuild with a PowerPoint presentation and a networking brunch.

Into this den of gilded hypocrisy steps Ingrid Robeyns, an academic who possesses the quaint, almost touching belief that logic might actually penetrate the thick skulls of the billionaire class. Robeyns, an economist and philosopher from Utrecht University, has arrived with a radical proposition: Limitarianism. The idea is offensively simple—that there should be a cap on how much wealth a single human being can hoard. She argues that extreme wealth is not just a symptom of a broken system, but a direct threat to democracy and a functional planet. It is a noble effort, the intellectual equivalent of trying to explain the virtues of veganism to a pack of wolves while they are currently mid-elk-carcass.

Robeyns points out the obvious: that the ultra-rich are the primary drivers of the climate crisis, the architects of political polarization, and the owners of the very platforms that spread the 'misinformation' they pretend to lament. But Davos is not a place for the obvious. It is a place for the 'complex.' In the world of the WEF, no problem is so dire that it cannot be solved by a 'public-private partnership'—a term that invariably translates to the public taking the risk while the private sector takes the profit. To suggest that the system itself is the problem, as Robeyns does, is to speak a language they have spent decades unlearning. They don’t want to fix the system; they want to optimize their survival within its collapse.

Historically, we’ve seen this movie before. The elites of the Gilded Age or the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy also believed they could manage the discontent of the masses with a few performative gestures and some well-timed charity. The difference is that today’s elite have better optics and a more sophisticated vocabulary. They don’t say 'let them eat cake'; they say 'we are committed to fostering inclusive growth through stakeholder capitalism.' It’s the same sentiment, just wrapped in the linguistic equivalent of a $5,000 suit. They treat inequality like a weather pattern—something regrettable but ultimately outside of human control—when it is, in fact, a deliberate policy choice made every single day in rooms exactly like the ones in Davos.

There is something profoundly depressing about the spectacle of a philosophy professor trying to convince a room full of people who own islands that they have too much money. It highlights the ultimate futility of our current discourse. The Left offers academic critiques and moral appeals to a group of people who have surgically removed their capacity for shame. The Right, meanwhile, continues its descent into a moronic, populist rage that ironically serves the interests of the very elites it pretends to hate by keeping the 'useless eaters' busy fighting over bathroom policies and cultural trivia while the treasury is looted in broad daylight.

Davos will end, as it always does, with a flurry of vague commitments and a collective pat on the back. The jets will take off, the carbon will be emitted, and the billionaires will return to their tax havens, safe in the knowledge that they have 'engaged' with the world’s problems. Meanwhile, the 'global threats' they discussed will continue to metastasize, fueled by the very wealth they refuse to limit. We are living in a world where the arsonists are the only ones invited to the fire safety convention, and we wonder why the building is still burning. It isn’t an oversight; it’s the design.