IS DAVOS THE PROBLEM? IT CERTAINLY ISN’T THE SOLUTION:

Kenneth Rogoff can pinpoint the moment he started to grow concerned Donald Trump would be the next U.S. president: It was when Rogoff’s fellow attendees at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last January said it could never happen. “A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,” says the Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. “No matter how improbable, the event most likely to happen is the opposite of whatever the Davos consensus is.”

The repeated failure of business and political elites to predict what’s coming—last year, that included the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union—doesn’t strike those returning this month to the Swiss Alps as very funny. After a year in which political upsets roiled financial markets and killed off the careers of once-dominant Davos-going politicians, the concern for delegates attending this year’s meeting isn’t that their forecasts are often wrong, but that their worldview is. . . .

Even as Davos attendees say they aren’t about to stop advocating for the policies they’ve endorsed for decades, which they believe remain the best way to deliver prosperity, it may be time to concede they’ve been going about it the wrong way. “There has to be some humility. For 30 years the elite have said, ‘We’re managing globalization, and we’re making it work for everyone,’ ” Woods says. “They cannot just keep repeating that.”

If you’re a “global citizen,” you’re a citizen of nowhere.