The road to Davos is serpentine, the site sublime with the seasonal sun of winter lighting freshly fallen snow. The Alps and alpine village architecture harmonize, and the champagne flutes glint and tinkle. The World Economic Forum, which closed its 2005 annual meeting yesterday, is both a place and a spirit, a singular success in bringing the titans of capital and financial influence together to exchange ideas about the most daunting and integrated problems of our time. The forum thrives on putting peers together in unlikely proximity and combinations, and in attracting the latest to taste world fame, such as the new president of the Ukraine, Viktor A. Yushchenko, fresh from the peaceful Orange Revolution in the streets that placed him in the presidential palace and center stage in the world.

But what actually happens? This year, the forum announced a “call for concrete actions” focused on what might be called the pillars of Davos 2005. After five days of dazzling and scintillating discussion on an almost infinite array of subjects, participants such as Bill Gates, Tony Blair, Australia’s Prime Minister Howard, and Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of Civicus World Alliance for Citizen Participation, came together to single out the six issues the forum attendees considered “most critical to the world today,” according to the forum’s closing press release, and to identify the key challenges related to each. At the top of their list, they placed poverty, followed by equitable globalization, climate change, education, the Middle East, and global governance.

It is hardly a surprising list, though the recommendation of the creation of a new international financing facility that would deliver overseas development assistance to the poorest countries “at a more rapid and predicable rate,” is a surprisingly clear admission that the poor nations of the world remain vulnerable to the political and economic vagaries of the developed world, tin-cupping their way, sometimes, from donor to donor for help with such basics as school rooms, clean drinking water, and education for girls.

The Davos spirit does add value to what are for the most part long-standing discussions about glaring global challenges now long-recognized. However, the ongoing reprioritizing of lists and goals has begun to feel more than mildly redundant, as the public waits for action that actually changes the touch and feel of reality day-to-day.

For example, Davos again trumpets the virtues of globalization, and Australia’s prime minister Howard stated: “the single greatest contribution to the developed world can make to poverty alleviation is to dissolve or begin to break down trade barriers,” since “trade access is worth far more to underdeveloped countries than development assistance.”

Perhaps. But even the titans of Davos have yet to come up with a meaningful answer for those who lose due to globalization, other than, perhaps, if the losers wait long enough, they, too, will become winners.

There is, for example, no real answer to how to meet the inescapable challenges of wage competition inherent in globalization, so that nations from Ireland to Iceland and America to China are not locked into a permanent competition to spend the least on labor. Bill Gates and Michael Dell may love the idea of cyberspace becoming the new migration field for work and workers, but even the high-end workers at Microsoft and Dell are jittery about what will, eventually, happen to their jobs. Davos did not, for example, generate an international standard of terms to cushion the fall of the workers displaced by globalization, or a minimum international standard for retraining of such workers.

On the environment, Al Gore and Tony Blair made strong calls for more thoughtful approaches to handling the world’s natural resources, and Mr. Blair convened a special G-8 CEO Climate Roundtable to talk candidly with business leaders from around the world about how climate change might be a negative for their companies. Yet, the forum’s summary reports left unclear a critical element in moving forward on climate change: what is the optimum balance between private and public action and between what governments and companies can themselves undertake now, without waiting for silver-bullet, least-cost technology that might be decades away.

Surely, one can never have too much thoughtful exchange, and it is exciting to bring together Nobel laureates in science with Hollywood stars, top politicians, and brilliant business entrepreneurs. Invention, innovation, and open minds are key ingredients to any recipe for progress. However, even as Davos has become more egalitarian and open to feisty challenges from non-business participants, it has become in an odd way more rarified, a forum within the forum, as participants scramble for slots in the most elite and special “invitation only” events. In the end, peers seek peers, and, to this extent, Davos, for all its global scope, needs to be concerned that it doesn’t, ultimately, fall prey to the force that is death to all true innovation, inbreeding. Power can be as blinding as snow.