amid the gloom

Amid the economic gloom, at least one business is booming this year – conferences on the crisis of capitalism.

This week, a host of policymakers and economists – including four heads of state or government and three Nobel prize-winning economists – descended on Paris to debate how to stick the shattered world economy back together again. A flurry of similar meetings is taking place in advance of the Group of 20 summit in London in April, which aims to redesign global governance.

It accompanies the boom in doing something, itself an expansion of the getting re-elected sector.

Fair enough. Only this morning I got my invitation as a select influential blogger to participate at Davos. I am invited to evolve a question for some random panel member, which may even be asked by someone who may even actually be there.

There seems to be a lot of this kind of thing about: the internet may be the ruin of paid journalism, but there does seem to be a compensatory drive to entrench the use of status as a kind of substitute currency by enticing people in a virtual cluster around various masters of the universe or facsimilies, dogsbodies, supercargo, flunkeys, amanuenses and men-of-business thereof.

Not much status, obviously. I mean if I did come up with a question and it was answered by, say, the Luxembourgeois finance minister it would be barely worth a couple of roll ups if translated into cash. If it got lobbed at Bill Gates, there might be a whole tin of Special Brew in it.

Anyway, I feel very important. And that’s what counts.