Patrick commented recently on the contrast at CES between the business people, who are happily creating the infrastructures -- physical and institutional -- necessary to unleash the full force of the creative community, and the academic/publc policy types, who fret obsessively about the details of fair use and other abstractions, and who actually want to stifle the creativity if it does not fit their Procrustean templates.

The Economist's blog Free Exchange notes a similar phenomenon at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Usually you can count on a healthy tension between the dreamy thinkers (for these purposes, anyone who writes or talks for a living, such as economists, journalists and most politicians) and the pragmatic doers (in Davos, business people).

The former come up with wild theories and grand plans. The latter say it will never work in practice.

But now, not least in Davos, it is the eggheads who are fretting and the men in Brioni suits who are looking on the bright side.

In the dinners and the discussions, the journalists and economists and politicians raise all the questions about inequality between winners and losers, deplore the absence of political leadership and compare this age of globalisation gloomily with the one that collapsed with the first world war.

The business people reply, by and large: “Come off it”.

It is not that they are being complacent, the business people say. Far from it. They are realists. They see things from the ground up. They see progress in each shampoo bottle bought in eastern Europe, in improvements to Africa's health care, in the broadening of choice everywhere.

posted by James DeLong @ 7:08 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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