Why the World Economic Forum is a Fundamentally Social Democratic Institution

By Sebastian Edinger

A Capitalist Enterprise?

Upon hearing the name World Economic Forum, one is unlikely to conceive of an institution that could, even with the most generous imagination, be described as social democratic. The label that will likely to probably the majority of people’s minds is "neoliberal." Indeed, one might argue that the WEF is neoliberal, and this assertion could be substantiated by at least the following considerations:

Representation of Large Corporations: The line-up of participants at the annual gatherings in Davos predominantly comprises chief executive officers, financiers, and members of the political ruling class who embody capitalist interests. In 2025, over 1,600 business leaders attended the conference, including 900 top CEOs. These figures underscore what is widely recognized: the WEF's meetings facilitate informal networking not only among business leaders but also between corporate leaders and policymakers, which enables private deal-making and regulatory influence.

Privatization of Public Goods, often euphemistically masked as “public-private partnerships,” which sounds more palatable. Yet, what this entails is that private firms and investors assume a greater role in domains such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure. This also implies that market-based solutions for social and global challenges constitute a significant part of the agenda.

The point at which the neoliberal converges with the social democratic orientation in an almost indissoluble manner is the matter of deregulation. The WEF stands for both deregulation and hyperregulation. Deregulation pertains chiefly to national regulations, meaning that deregulation, as envisioned by the WEF, seeks to undermine national controls in order to globalize what was once containable through national oversight. Hyperregulation, on the other hand, is located primarily on a different level. Its true locus lies not in attacking bureaucratic regulations, but rather in promoting the implementation of bureaucratic regulation of values and worldviews as well as in the coordinated integration of economic deregulations, mostly aimed at denationalization, so as to fit into this overarching social-engineering hyperregulation of a social democratic kind. Now let's get to the social democratic anthropology underlying the WEF's agenda.

I shall enumerate three aspects of the WEF’s worldview, which do not merely embellish its agenda but, rather, guide its influence down to the minutest details.

(1) The WEF is social democratic because it propagates a social democratic conception of humanity—the anthropological vision of genetic egalitarianism. The foundation of this ideology rests upon the assumption of a fundamental compatibility among all ethnicities and cultures. The One-World vision is presupposed as an indisputable truth, and if you are opposing this vision, you are not engaging in legitimate national self-preservation or, on the level of thinking, in search of the truth, but in malicious sabotage of the truth. Even if people don't value-align, we can easily make them value-align by proper education; there is nothing innate in their nature that brings about cultural differences.

(2) The WEF is social democratic because its entire developmental vision for individual societies—and even the supposition that such a vision for a global society is conceivable—is underpinned by this genetic egalitarianism. The cornerstone of this ideological component is the presupposition that all ethnicities and cultures are compatible, even where compatibility does not presently exist and is arbitrarily absent. To illustrate this: IQ differences are "not real" in any but a temporary sense, a "global Flynn effect" would make us all equal (then you would have to presuppose that IQ tests in fact quantify intelligence reliably, that they are not "just constructs", and that the Flynn effect in fact perfectly tracks the true development of intellectual capacities), differences in potential can easily be eliminated if we implement the right measures: clean water, good nutrition, solid schooling, and so on.

(3) The unacknowledged intellectual catalyst of the WEF’s 21st-century agenda is a cosmopolitan social democrat whose ideas have been followed, often to detrimental effect, in all essential respects, namely Anthony Giddens, particularly his seminal work The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Whether the works of Giddens are widely known to the forum’s architects remains speculative. Nevertheless, Giddens has been active in various prominent capacities, including as an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and as Director of the London School of Economics.

To my genuine astonishment this link is not discussed extensively, because Giddens is the mentor of Tony Blair, who, for a while, was rumored to be Klaus Schwab's successor, and he even considered the implementation of Giddens’ ideas his political mission: "Our work is at an early stage, and we are learning as we advance. But New Labour in government is putting the Third Way into practice." (https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111blair.html, 1998)
What does the Third Way program look like according to Anthony Giddens? He provides his readers with a list of key features of the third way program, and you will find yourself very well accustomed to everything that’s on the list taken from Giddens’s book, which, incidentally, was published in 1998:

Source: Giddens 1998, 70.

I shall refrain from elaborating upon those aspects that ostensibly manifest themselves as the social democratic attributes of the World Economic Forum—such as its preoccupation with Social Justice—and instead turn my attention to the ideological substrata that undergird the edifice of Social Justice ideology. There exist certain presuppositions that one must first internalize or regard as axiomatic in order to traverse such intellectual pathways. The Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution says: "A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system." And what is meant here is a "broader social system" that mirrors the ideological designing activities of actors like the WEF; it does NOT mean an organically grown social system that could differ fundamentally from the WEF's policy plans and value system.

The following ideological facets and key tenets may be deemed inherently social democratic:

a) The anthropological paradigm, encapsulated in the doctrine of genetic egalitarianism, i.e., innate—even metaphysical—compatibility. This pretty much needs no explanation.

b) The resultant developmental vision, predicated upon the principle of compatibilization. In the speech quoted above, Blair truly says: "Higher educational standards are the key to international competitiveness and an inclusive society for the future." (Which Western country has migration from the global south plus higher educational standards than before? Exactly.) If you know the on-the-ground reality of educational systems in countries blessed with diversity, you will probably be glad if you don't die laughing at the travesty you are witnessing. The US basically needs two different educational systems if it wants to avoid tiny super-minorities of Hispanic and especially African-American students at good universities (and they have to follow through if they want to stay good, but Harvard has submitted to the diversity mess to such a degree that remedial math classes are now needed there). In Germany (any many other countries), PISA gave us basically a "score caste system."

For math:

Source: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/12/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_76772a36/53f23881-en.pdf, p. 34.

For reading proficiency:

c) Anti-Nationalism. The thriving, prosperous, homogeneous nation poses a significant danger, because “nations provide an integrative mechanism of citizenship, but nationalism can become belligerent and nationalist aspirations have fed many destructive conflicts over the past century and a half.” (Giddens 1998, 129) We know the fallacy: it happened, and it happened because it had to happen, and it would happen again, so we have to prevent it from happening again. – The nation has to be contained just like the Soviet Union had to be contained, but since nations are too dangerous if left to themselves, you better destroy them as nations, while naively betting on being able to keep all the things you like about them for “citizens of the world”: modern infrastructure, social cohesion, high educational standards, and so on. Well, this was not an experiment that accidentally failed; the idea was simply stupid to an indescribable degree.

d) Mythological constructivism as a demythologization project, in other words: the mythology of nation-building and the constructivism of essentiality—perhaps the most absurd paradox: “The nation is not something given in nature, and whatever remote connections they may have to earlier ethnic communities, nations are a product of relatively recent history. They have all been built from a diversity of cultural fragments.” (Ibid, 131) – Yes, they succeeded because the ethnic differences were very small. All Western European nations are, whatever their microscopic ethnic differences may be, white nations. White people from all over Europe have become French, English, or Germans. They are diverse, but diverse under the umbrella of sufficient ethnic homogeneity. This, of course, renders it necessary to extend the worn-out, stale, and insipid scheme to ethnic identity. What a surprise that the great meisterdenker lets us know: “Ethnic identities aren’t any less constructed than national identities.” (Ibid, 133) Could anyone see that one coming? So why don’t we implement the educational standards of the 1960s regardless of the results? There's no way for us to “construct” our way out of the havoc this would wreak.

Giddens also specifically targeted the multicultural destruction of Germany: “Germany is something of a test case for cosmopolitan nationalism in the context of Europe, because the country officially denies its multiculturalism.” (Ibid, 136) It was none of his business, but he even outlined how to go about the erasure of the German people: “To pioneer a cosmopolitan identity, the citizenship laws need to be changed and a major cultural shift made.” (Ibid, 137) What is considered useful destruction in the case of Germany is just a case-specific application of the concept of a programmatically all-pervasive cosmopolitan democracy: “Cosmopolitan democracy is not only about the movement of governance towards a world level, but about its diffusion downwards to local regions.” (Ibid, 146) Speaking the language of a low-level representative from the advertising industry, Giddens, this agent of dysgenic annihilation, says: "Greater harmonization of educational practices and standards, for instance, is desirable for a cosmopolitan labour force." (Ibid, 125) In fact, harmonization means flattening, bringing standards to a level at which they align with dysgenically decaying potential. Giddens, believing in the equality of natural cognitive potential, thinks the multiculturalization of Western countries and the upholding of the traditional standards that allowed them to become what they were until recently are compatible with each other: "As in other areas, harmonization is not necessarily the enemy of educational diversity and may even be the condition of sustaining it." (Ibid, 125) How is that possible? How can he arrive at such absurd conclusions? Well, let’s take a look at what he says about IQ testing.

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Giddens’ IQ denialism

Giddens’ preferences reveal how he feels about IQ tests, even before you take a look at what he has to say. “Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s theoretical framework remains the most systematic synthesis yet produced for understanding the role of schooling in the reproduction of social inequality.” He is your conventional leftist in that the possibility of working with Bourdieu’s framework while also acknowledging the fundamental results of intelligence research does not even cross his mind. A tough challenge for Giddens—one that cannot be satisfactorily answered within the Bourdieuian framework—is presented by Peter Saunders’ book, Social Mobility Myths (2010). However, Giddens only mentions Saunders’ work in passing in his textbook Sociology (2009); unfortunately, Saunders' excellent book was not published when Giddens took on intelligence research, but the errors he committed are numerous and not dependent on Saunders' findings.

For example, Giddens really thinks he can brush off the concept of predictive validity by stating that it is completely unsurprising and therefore trivial:

"Scores on IQ tests do in fact correlate well with academic performance, which is not surprising, since the tests were originally developed to predict success in school. They therefore also correlate closely with social, economic and ethnic differences, since these are associated with variations in levels of educational attainment." (Giddens 2009, 850)

The midwit mantra "correlation is not causation" yields no power against the validity of the correlations acknowledged by Giddens. (Everybody who cannot casuistically explain and validate the sentence "correlation is not causation" should be legally prohibited from uttering it.) Giddens does not seem to understand that mountains of data sets with basically the exact same correlations cannot be reduced to a "weird statistical occurrence". He also doesn't understand that high predictive validity is not an anecdote concerning IQ statistics, but a scientific-theoretical seal of approval. And it only gets worse.

Giddens falls for the scientific myth (or even hoax?) called "stereotype threat": "Some research has demonstrated that African Americans score six points lower on IQ tests when the tester is white than when the tester is black.” Giddens does not even refer to the scientific papers that recent debate centers around; instead, he refers to Leon Kamin, an outright denialist of heritability, whose views could hardly have been refuted in a more devastating fashion by recent research literature (e.g., Vinkhuyzen et al. 2012; Schwabe et al. 2017; Falck 2021, 64—65). He also refers to Stephen Jay Gould on another occasion. In short, he’s quoting from his own ideological bubble. I’ve got good news for people who are interested in getting the basic facts about this topic presented in a clear and concise manner: Russell T. Warne devotes an entire chapter to the stereotype threat myth in his very good book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, but you can also leave it at reading his essay The $67.5 million wasted on stereotype threat research. (Diane F. Halpern deals with stereotype threat extensively in her book Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, 2012, and she finds more reasons for eager skepticism, than for having found the origin of how nonexistent differences have been manufactured.) Giddens not only takes stereotype threat for an unshakable scientific finding, he is even immune to questioning how the two things relate to each other:

1) “Some research has demonstrated that African Americans score six points lower on IQ tests when the tester is white than when the tester is black.” (Giddens 2009, 851)

2) The results of IQ tests “correlate closely with social, economic and ethnic differences”. (Ibid, 850)
They generally correlate closely, but only some research has (if you acknowledge Giddens’ point of view) demonstrated stereotype threat. What about the oceanic gap between some and generally? No questions about the quality of research on stereotype threat? Giddens asks no questions about the size of IQ difference that is still more than half a standard deviation even if you take 6 points away. And, most egregious, Giddens doesn’t realize that by accepting the findings as findings, he would at the very minimum have to require stereotype psychology to work the other way around: Let a black tester bathe them in compliments and outright lies and see if you can turn them into super scorers. On a societal level, this is what DEI tries to do, and we see the results both internally and geopolitically. Affirmative action is based on the premise that initial help is going to enable self-reliance: we help them in the beginning, then they will thrive and demonstrate greatness. – And has anyone tested whether or not whites score 8 points higher when a white tester tells them beforehand that they are a great genius race? If stereotype threat is real, why shouldn't affirmative "stereotype catapulting" be effective as well? No one tried this, so white IQ scores may be vastly skewed in favor of white people. (I’m half joking here, but the logical problem doesn’t go away.)
Of course, Giddens also doesn’t understand the Flynn effect.

“Similar differences can be seen across generations, with average IQ scores rising substantially over the past half century for whole populations. When old and new versions of IQ tests are given to the same group of people, they score significantly higher on the old tests. There is no evidence that young people today are innately superior in intelligence to their parents or grandparents; the better scores are therefore more likely to result from increasing prosperity and social advantage. The notion that some entire racial groups are on average more intelligent than others remains unproven and improbable.” (Giddens 2009, 851)

Isn’t it fascinating how Giddens jumps from “young people” to “entire racial groups” without regard for the findings he quotes? Isn’t it fascinating how this leap is supposedly backed by scientific reasoning? He uses the Flynn effect as a reason not to take IQs within a single population seriously and immediately misuses it to deny the validity of population IQ differences unrelated to the Flynn effect. National SAT scores are determined annually, and you can see clear ethnic differences that have no intergenerational component. But for Giddens, differences don’t matter unless the results don’t fit his ideology. So why should he even address the fact that ethnic IQ differences persist with staggering continuity alongside the Flynn effect? This is the WEF’s true mastermind (Harari is merely their current intellectual mascot), and what he has to offer is rather bleak. The problem with Giddens' misunderstanding of intelligence research is not that he makes accidental errors that can be glossed over. If your concept of cosmopolitan democracy is based on equality being supported by sufficient cognitive equality in actual potential (not just theoretical, as would be the case in long-term planning and management of sexual selection), then the results of intelligence research, if taken seriously and sufficiently understood, represent a severe blow to your position, as they undermine the central premise of cognitive—and thus societal—compatibility among citizens (regardless of ethnic differences; see Saunders 2010). In other words: If you are a universalist in the cosmopolitan-democracy sense and argue on the basis of "philosophical" principles, you can ask your opponents to take you on that level; but when you start talking nonsense about intelligence research and try to cement your "philosophy" by doing so, your considerations backfire and undermine the premises of your ideology.

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The hilariously pointless reference to Singapore

The World Economic Forum hails Singapore regularly. For example, it states that "Singapore's approach to a skills-first human capital development system aligns closely with global initiatives such as the World Economic Forum’s Reskilling Revolution.” (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/singapore-data-driven-approach-build-skills-first-economy/) Also, in the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report, Singapore is crowned the world’s most competitive economy, topping the US and other major economies. They may like the political results Singapore can rightfully be proud of, but Davos stands for the exact opposite of Singapore when you look at their former Young Global Leaders do in order to annihilate the West.

Four points should be taken in consideration here:

1) Davos does not stand for a radical meritocracy, which is the hallmark of Singapore. The WEF does not meaningfully influence anyone in this direction. For social democracy, there is only the family of mankind and marginal differences that can be eliminated through the education system, support, and the improvement of economic conditions. This ideological core assumption of social democracy underpins the entire worldview of the WEF, whereas Singapore’s education system is based on Lee Kuan Yew’s philosophy, which acknowledges IQ differences and makes them the basis for the stratification of the education system, insofar as these differences are reflected in actual results. Nowhere in Lee Kuan Yew’s thinking are there social-democratic assumptions that a natural order of talent could be overturned by any kind of educational revolution. The book that most closely corresponds to the theoretical foundations of Singapore’s education system is Charles Murray’s Real Education; the WEF’s rhetoric has nothing to do with this, and the policies of Western countries even less so.

2) There is no Singapore-style Great Marriage Debate in the West. Such a debate would actually be the necessary Great Reset, not the nonsense currently being promoted. So that everyone here knows exactly what I mean, I'll quote Lee Kuan Yew in detail:

”What made me decide to make that Great Marriage Debate speech was a report on my desk analyzing the 1980 census figures. It showed that our brightest women were not marrying and would not be represented in the next generation. The implications were grave. Our best women were not reproducing themselves because men who were their educational equals did not want to marry them. About half of our university gradu­ates were women; nearly two-thirds of them were unmarried. The Asian man, whether Chinese, Indian, or Malay, preferred to have a wife with less education than himself. Only 38 percent of graduate men were married to graduate women in 1983.

This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to remain  unmentioned and unchecked. I decided to shock the young men out of their stupid, old-fashioned, and damaging prejudices. I quoted studies of identical  twins done in Minnesota in the 1980s which showed that these twins were similar in many respects. Although they had been brought up separately and in different countries, about 80 percent of their vocabulary, IQ, habits, likes, and dislikes in food and friends, and other character and personality traits were identical. In other words, nearly 80 percent of a person’s makeup is from nature, and about 20 percent the result of nurture.” (Lee Kuan Yew 2000, 136—37)

Instead of pushing this as an agenda, the WEF pushes for open borders, endless migration, and the dissolution of national identities. This is not a Singaporean program—in the case of the targeted West, it is an ethnocidal assault conducted by lame, third-rate ideologues. The only Great Reset the West, and Europe in particular, needs is a Great Reset of European family formation and cultural restoration, which, of course, includes a re-Christianization that can hardly be achieved with the help of today’s Christian churches, as they have been turned into DEI-associated, nation-destroying, ethnocide-promoting, worthless nonsense machines. The Great Marriage Debate is the debate the West needs in order to achieve the positive results it desperately needs; third-world migration is what it needs if it wants to bring about its own suicide.

3) No law & order approach is being aimed for. Instead, spreading anarchy and lawlessness, with crime growing without limits and an ever more ludicrous and dignity-destroying overrepresentation of third-world descendants among the perpetrators, all cheered on by the lackeys of the multiculturalist agenda. – While this concerns George Soros more than the WEF, Western countries following the WEF’s guidelines are marked by an intentionally designed collapse of law and order, and the WEF does absolutely nothing to promote a different political approach—presumably because they sense that pacifying these countries would require a process of comprehensive remigration. Instead of even thinking about something like that, the WEF stubbornly and cluelessly stands for a social-democratic ideology of the fundamental compatibility of all people and the possibility of making them compatible.

The WEF’s social democrats were never up to dealing with intelligence research, but propagated ideologies that presupposed the irrelevance of the latter. They were never up to the task, even though they made too many people believe they were. It's time to finally give up on them and get serious about serious issues—and found new institutions. What needs to be done can only be done without Davos—while Singapore remains a very good inspiration. The ruling class needs to be replaced by real elites, that is, by people who are capable of writing more serious things than just nice but intellectually unimpressive essays like Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is compilatory in character and in which Schwab does not coin the term "Fourth Industrial Revolution”, which has already been introduced in the 2014 VINT Research Report: https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/batangas-state-university/bs-architecture/4th-industrial-revolution/24194594

References:

Falck, S. (2021). The Psychology of Intelligence. London; New York: Routledge.

Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Giddens, A. (2009). Sociology. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.

Halpern, D. F. (2012). Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. New York: Psychology Press.

Lee, K. Y. (2000). From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000. Singapore: Times Editions: Singapore Press Holdings.

Saunders, P. (2010). Social Mobility Myths. London: Civitas.

Schwabe, I., Janss, L., & van den Berg, S. M. (2017). Can We Validate the Results of Twin Studies? A Census-Based Study on the Heritability of Educational Achievement. Frontiers in Genetics, 8:160.

Vinkhuyzen, A. A. E., van der Sluis, S., Maes, H. H. M., & Posthuma, D. (2012). Reconsidering the Heritability of Intelligence in Adulthood: Taking Assortative Mating and Cultural Transmission into Account. Behavior Genetics, 42(2), 187-198.