During the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a school auditorium outside the ski resort’s secure perimeter, there’s a smaller Open Forum – no invitation required for anyone who can make it up to the Swiss Alps. It’s TEDx to Davos’s TED, a neat package of webstream-ready inspiration. One of this year’s presentations was Life Lessons from Jazz: Improvisation as a Way of Life, in which Columbia ethnomusicology professor Chris Washburne and his band taught the audience how to survive neoliberal uncertainty with the “spontaneous creativity that we have inherited from the African-American culture.”
Quoting the early soloist Sidney Bechet, Washburne calls jazz the sound of freedom. “It’s the sounds that emulate [sic] from the emancipated slaves. The newfound freedom that they found in the South of the United States, and they had to make sense of that freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty, and to rebuild their lives.” So, too, do we have to grasp the new freedoms of the neoliberal world to improvise a way of life that celebrates uncertainty and precarity.
A favored metaphor in Davos, jazz offers these life lessons to the precariat and the elites alike, while negating the responsibility of the latter to do anything about the vulnerabilities of the former. We’re all in the music together, and risk sets the rhythm. Jazz musicians “have one of the riskiest jobs in the world, because failure is just around the corner at every single turn,” Washburne assures us between sets of Azure and Caravan. “As a matter of fact, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures.”
The World Economic Forum belongs to those who drape themselves in risk and find opportunity in each reversal of fortune. They are used to improv – only improv promises mostly to enrich them, rather than allowing them to scrape by. In a way, the economic elite see this meeting as their own Montreux Jazz, a place for free-market thought leaders to fearlessly riff on the future as it comes.
Their setlist comes in an annual Global Risks report prepared at the start of the year. This document, with its clean graphics in five colors – Google plus purple – lays bare the terrors of the moment and sorely tests the macho boardroom definition of risk. In the corporate world, risk always carries a harmonic of opportunity; always exists to be snatched up by someone with big enough balls and a good enough hedge. It is a kind of commodity. Any disaster just needs to be quantified in two variables – likelihood of occurring, and potential impact – and it’s ready for the market.
The first Global Risk reports emerged seven years ago from a network of experts and roundtable consultations bringing together risk advisors, academics and executives. Insurance corporations – Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance, Marsh & McLennan – played, and continue to play, a nonspecific role as “collaborators,” providing guidance in the selection of risks. In 2011, the process switched to a larger email survey of leaders and thinkers from business, government, international organizations and the academies. Respondents were asked to rate a list of risks by likelihood of occurrence in the next ten years, by potential cost in billions of dollars, and by connection with other risks.
In 2012 the survey pool grew to include NGOs, and the unit of potential impact changed from billions of dollars to a value-neutral five point scale. Like the Open Forum, this was Davos in its inclusive, multi-stakeholder guise. The sample nevertheless remains heavily skewed toward the business world, which accounts for over 42 percent of respondents this year; all other groups are dwarfed, with governments coming in at 8.1 percent.
The list of risks also reached its current size and shape in 2012, and the authors decided to fix it in place for the sake of year-to-year analysis. These fifty possible disasters would thenceforth serve as the basic scale on which to jam – the definitive threats to business and, by extension, humanity. Until the next overhaul, we’re stuck with the sound of 2012 – but if it’s catastrophic imagination that we need, 2012 was a creative year.
Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up. Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. It’s never been clear exactly whose nightmares these risks are, and the lack of attribution is part of the point. They are supposed to rise up out of the data, objective and urgent, the voice of the planet demanding to be heard.
Quoting the early soloist Sidney Bechet, Washburne calls jazz the sound of freedom. “It’s the sounds that emulate [sic] from the emancipated slaves. The newfound freedom that they found in the South of the United States, and they had to make sense of that freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty, and to rebuild their lives.” So, too, do we have to grasp the new freedoms of the neoliberal world to improvise a way of life that celebrates uncertainty and precarity.A favored metaphor in Davos, jazz offers these life lessons to the precariat and the elites alike, while negating the responsibility of the latter to do anything about the vulnerabilities of the former. We’re all in the music together, and risk sets the rhythm. Jazz musicians “have one of the riskiest jobs in the world, because failure is just around the corner at every single turn,” Washburne assures us between sets of Azure and Caravan. “As a matter of fact, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures.”
The World Economic Forum belongs to those who drape themselves in risk and find opportunity in each reversal of fortune. They are used to improv – only improv promises mostly to enrich them, rather than allowing them to scrape by. In a way, the economic elite see this meeting as their own Montreux Jazz, a place for free-market thought leaders to fearlessly riff on the future as it comes.
Their setlist comes in an annual Global Risks report prepared at the start of the year. This document, with its clean graphics in five colors – Google plus purple – lays bare the terrors of the moment and sorely tests the macho boardroom definition of risk. In the corporate world, risk always carries a harmonic of opportunity; always exists to be snatched up by someone with big enough balls and a good enough hedge. It is a kind of commodity. Any disaster just needs to be quantified in two variables – likelihood of occurring, and potential impact – and it’s ready for the market.
The first Global Risk reports emerged seven years ago from a network of experts and roundtable consultations bringing together risk advisors, academics and executives. Insurance corporations – Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance, Marsh & McLennan – played, and continue to play, a nonspecific role as “collaborators,” providing guidance in the selection of risks. In 2011, the process switched to a larger email survey of leaders and thinkers from business, government, international organizations and the academies. Respondents were asked to rate a list of risks by likelihood of occurrence in the next ten years, by potential cost in billions of dollars, and by connection with other risks.
In 2012 the survey pool grew to include NGOs, and the unit of potential impact changed from billions of dollars to a value-neutral five point scale. Like the Open Forum, this was Davos in its inclusive, multi-stakeholder guise. The sample nevertheless remains heavily skewed toward the business world, which accounts for over 42 percent of respondents this year; all other groups are dwarfed, with governments coming in at 8.1 percent.
The list of risks also reached its current size and shape in 2012, and the authors decided to fix it in place for the sake of year-to-year analysis. These fifty possible disasters would thenceforth serve as the basic scale on which to jam – the definitive threats to business and, by extension, humanity. Until the next overhaul, we’re stuck with the sound of 2012 – but if it’s catastrophic imagination that we need, 2012 was a creative year.
Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up. Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. It’s never been clear exactly whose nightmares these risks are, and the lack of attribution is part of the point. They are supposed to rise up out of the data, objective and urgent, the voice of the planet demanding to be heard.
by T. Paul Cox, TNI | Read more:
Image: Imp Kerr
