Yet it can't be mocked too much. Along with the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Conference, this is one of the key meetings of the year. No policy is made here; it is all talk, some of it banal and platitudinous. But the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide - and this is why Chancellor Gordon Brown should have come, rather than cancelling at short notice. The Left should not allow the international conversation to be dominated wholly by the Right; if there is to be any regime change worldwide - whether on the sustainability and necessity of the welfare state or the need to act over destabilising capital flows - it will only emerge if meetings like this accept that such issues are on the agenda and have powerful backers. The voices of even the pragmatic Left that Brown represents are not strong here. It was an important missed opportunity.

That is not to say that Davos ideology is uniformly conservative. The meetings became important in the second half of the 1980s when it became clear that the system in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was breaking down - and when the Asian economies joined the hunt for inward investment. Davos, founded in the early 1970s, found itself propelled to prominence - it was where political leaders, especially those from Eastern Europe, desperate for inward investment and a platform to show their attachment to the credo of economic liberalisation, could parade before international businessmen and financiers.

But the events in Asia over the last six months have shaken the Davos view to its core. Nobody foresaw that those apparent paragons of the world it sought to build, the Asian tigers, would prove to have such clay feet. But like priests of any religion, Davos is suffering only a temporary loss of faith - and in ways which show its better side. Asia went wrong because too many of its governments were non-democratic, corrupt and authoritarian, running a system of crony capitalism; in Britain only writers such as Paul Foot match the contempt in which Davos holds, for example, Indonesia's President Suharto.

Davos's globalisers want democratic government, the rule of law, transparent rules, fair play for all and, in Asia, extraordinarily strong social-security nets. Nor does their prescription stop there. For example, Davos deplores the US trade embargo of Cuba, declaring it absurd; it believes Cuba should be opened up to the world system and to the liberalising impact of inward investment. And even the welfare state attracts defenders. As the South Korean delegation has repeatedly explained, the price that must be paid for labour-market flexibility and volatile exchange rates is a powerful safety net underwriting the fall-out from such economic rigour and large-scale industrial restructuring. They intend to build a European-style social security system.

But in the round, Davos is unflaggingly committed to capitalism, yet not that is paralleled by its commitment to democracy and human rights. Some businessmen can surprise you by their liberalism and social concern. They are developing a new value system around their capitalist beliefs that is much more attractive than the slash-and-burn, short-termist approach of the Anglo American Right, and you can see how intriguingly it connects with New Labour. Blair and Brown are onto something.

Closer to home even critics of the personal journalism inquiring into the dynamics of relationships should be aware that Davos has never laid on so many sessions about the personal. Like Western culture generally, it is being de-masculinised. There is also the beginning of a new argument about how to refashion the international financial system, although on Friday the organisers laid it on two miles from the conference centre. It's still not quite pukka.

But the core of Davos remains its attachment to what it sees as hard economics. It is axiomatic, for example, that privatisation is always good, and stories abound of newly privatised companies that have increased output with a fraction of their old workforce. A group of French and German business leaders argued the European economic and social system has broken down. The French want a more 'flexible' labour market; the Germans more investor activism to shake up sleepy companies. But New Labour should note, it is not so much a strong social security system that is criticised but its interaction with sclerotic companies and powerful unions. This has Thatcherite overtones, but is not quite Thatcherism. Social values count, even for self-styled business 'revolutionaries'; the aim is to create more employment in Europe.