Many Panels

The day began as the sun lit the top of the snow covered peaks turned gold in the dawn light. Today was one of the clear, blue, cold days in the high mountains of Switzerland. Today was the most intense in terms of planned activities. I had three panels. On one I was a member and two I chaired, with the last being the most fun. The first was a panel called "Can you trust your model?", which included Nassim Taleb, Patrick Cronin from the National Defense University whom I know, and a very interesting epidemiologist from Oxford, Angela McLean. The conversation was fairly deep on what models are good for (learning how things work) and what they are not(predicting).

The second panel, which I chaired, was over lunch and the topic was "Rising Population: Overload or Opportunity." The panel was quite diverse including two from the Middle East, Nigeria, Britain, India, a labor leader, and a social entrepreneur. The group was modestly optimistic. The focus should be on family size and form because that helps enable woman to gain more control of reproduction. It will lead to a steady slowing of population growth. There was even a sense of a bit of progress in some places like Saudi Arabia. The best moment came when the observation was made that the Catholic countries of Southern Europe had the lowest growth rates and that they clearly were not following the Pope's guidance. One of the participants from Portugal responded, "We may be Catholic, but we're not stupid."

The final panel over dinner was on "Extreme Events," and was massively oversold because the panelists were academic rock stars. Not only Nassim Taleb, but historian Niall Ferguson and Yale's Robert Shiller. While I tried to get them to focus on why decision makers did not pay attention to their perceptive and timely warnings of imminent crisis, they actually focused mainly on the psychology of looking ahead. Nassim took a mathematical approach, Niall, a historical approach, and Shiller an economic approach. They were all articulate brilliant and witty, the arguments strong, but at the end of the day I think that Niall was most convincing with his arguments that a deep understanding of history can lead one to the right analogy that clarifies the nature of the moment, what could happen, and what the consequences of action might be.

The most dramatic moment of the day came during a panel on Gaza when Erdogan, the PM of Turkey, stormed off stage after a confrontation with Shimon Peres and the moderator, my friend David Ignatius of the Washington Post. No one had seen anything quite like it at Davos.

President Obama sent his friend and advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to address a very full hall. She gave a terrific speech, telling us that we need to understand Chicago to understand Obama, that for him the key word was responsibility, that they were trying to forge a holistic strategy and rebuild trust in many venues, and that he intended for the US to lead on climate change. It was well received.

And all during the day, many interesting conversations. While I was discussing Putin's speech with Georgetown professor Angela Stent, Al Gore came up and gave me a big hug. He is looking almost svelte. There was another Dutch Prince, the Norwegian Crown Prince, Tim Garton Ash from Stanford and Oxford, and water expert Peter Gleick. We will be posting a great water video he did on the GBN website.

Toward the end of the day I caught up with Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson. Peter, a new daddy (boy Luc), is working on a new album of covers with people like Paul Simon and David Bowie playing each others songs. It's called something like Scratch My Back. Richard and I mostly discussed the work of The Elders and how to move it forward. The day finally wound down at the Oxford University night-cap. Another great conversation with Martin Wolf. His key point was that the nature and scale of the credit crisis is so novel that it is not clear that we know what we are doing when we try to stop it. He is deeply worried. And that worries me.

It's 1:30 time for bed.