A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,

—Kenneth Rogoff, who noted that he started to worry about a Trump win when, “Fellow attendees at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last January said it could never happen.”

While intended as a joke, it is true.

When bad really things happen it almost always happens because the conventional wisdom has failed, and the species known as “Davos Man” is incapable of looking beyond the conventional wisdom.