| By Stephanie Flanders BBC Economics editor, in Davos |
The World Economic Forum in Davos is supposed to be a gathering of the elite. A time when the world's movers and shakers go to the Swiss mountains to talk about being on top of the world.
It is a club. And with any club, the rule is that you want it to be as small as possible while still including you.
The knack of the organisers for exploiting this weakness of human nature fits with everything you have ever heard about the Swiss.
I am told that the private companies that bankroll the event find it ruinously expensive to bring anyone other than the boss. He or she gets in fairly cheap because it helps Davos to be full of number ones.
You pay a lot more to bring your number twos and threes. They are worth less to the gathering, but the organisers know they are the ones who will really, really want to come.
The result? A lot of money for the World Economic Forum, but also a lot of people in the club.
This year the "select few" going to Davos ran to more than 2,500.
Yet Davos has an answer to that too.
It is all in the colour of your badge. That tells you where you are in the pecking order, in the Forum's favoured phrase, your level of "guestdom".
And trust me, the powers that be have a very shrewd idea of who is up and who is down.
White badges mean you are a full participant.
If you are a journalist that means the holy grail of being able to wander the conference centre, collecting bigwigs - and their mobile phone numbers - from the hallways, like so many hanging fruit.
Reporters with orange badges can only lurk in the background, like the second-class citizens they are.
Plain purple or green spells even higher levels of the elite elite. But I think you have to be a former president to even know what they mean.
The upshot is that thousands of self-important people can spend four days living cheek by jowl in a tiny ski resort and still come away with their egos intact - assuming no-one asked the president of Mexico to talk on a panel with fewer than two other heads of state.
Anthropologists would have a field day, if they had a chance of getting in.
Changing priorities
But at this year's gathering of the tribe, even cursory observation would have revealed a change of mood.
The gift bags said it all.
A few years ago they were giving away state-of-the-art electronic organisers. This year there was a bargain basement pedometer and a request that you walk around the village instead of taking the limo.
There were sideshows to distract the condemned.
A neuro-biologist turned Buddhist monk told the participants that it was time "to take a more altruistic world view".
The Forum's own group of Young Global Leaders held an event declaring it was time to "De-Worm the World".
The UN sponsors of the "refugee run", as it was called, said it was based on the idea that you only understand a man if you walk a mile in his shoes.
It was probably less than a mile, but for many at Davos this year I suspect that pretending to wear a refugee's shoes was a pleasant break from actually wearing their own.
Reversal of fortunes
Back inside the conference hall, there was no badge to escape the gloom about the global economy.
And in the end, perhaps for the first time in its 40-year history, the starry list of participants told you less about the state of the world than the list of those who stayed at home.
Most of the world's leading bankers did not show. Those that did come only came out at night.
The financiers were top dogs here even two years ago. Now even Davos man considers them the lowest of the low.
Governments and their old-fashioned rescue packages are back on top. The American government most of all.
None of the key players in the new Obama administration made the trip. They were too busy saving the world.
The grandees at Davos want them to succeed. But they know that in the world economy that comes out of this, they may no longer have the plum spot.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7871994.stm
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