Jake's View | Don’t believe everything you read in surveys
From Hong Kong’s competitiveness to housing affordability, we are awash in self-important surveys that tell us nothing new
Hong Kong’s ranking for the competitiveness of its economy has slid two notches in a global survey by the World Economic Forum, as it struggles to migrate from being a global financial centre to an innovation led economy.
SCMP, Sept. 29
As drowning humans clutch at straws, so think tanks desperate for the publicity that is their breath of life reach for country ranking surveys when publicity runs thin. They are gasping now, judging by the number of surveys coming out.
World Economic Forum is a German professor by the name of Klaus Schwab who claims to have invented the free lunch concept of “stakeholder” and who started WEF as an annual talk shop for name droppers in academia and politics.
Every winter they gather for a few days in Davos, Switzerland, to drop their names at each other and then, having been mutually impressed, to issue statements that talk of cautious optimism and resolutions that begin, “Government must...” The prostitutes do a grand business, I’m told. But once a year is not enough and so WEF has also got into the preaching business with a global ranking survey that this year has demoted Hong Kong a few notches because our business community supposedly cites the capacity to innovate as its “biggest concern” and we’re not doing it.
We published this sad lament a day after reporting the results of a local survey showing that two thirds of Hong Kong people plan to be self-employed, and don’t particularly fancy doing it in hi-tech. Hurrah! My total faith in the common sense of Hong Kong has proved itself again. We have one of the most innovative societies in the world and one reason it has been so successful is that it has stayed well away from that money-losing sinkhole of vanity, the digital tech business. All yours, Klaus.