This conference illustrates another way that the money sector is unwilling to face the future. Given modern technology why should anyone have to travel half way around the globe to attend a conference in person anymore?
We seem to manage to interact in ways similar to a conference (papers presented, citations offered, supporting illustrative material shown, and comments offered) without going anywhere. I can't think of anything earth changing that has emerged from a conference or white paper in, well, ever.
Earth shaking discoveries get disseminated via other mechanisms, although sometimes the announcement is withheld for dramatic effect until a conference. (This is more true of scientific conferences.)
The world seems to have created an international punditry class and in order to justify their existence they hold meeting and publish papers. Pointless. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
And to be honest, I am still nervously trying to decipher Zwackus's meaning in his comment that If the thought of cost even occurs to you, you're probably not the kind of person they're inviting.
Having said that, I think it's asking too much of the EU to go from 0 to 100 in one step: i.e. from single-location, physical attendance-based conferences to completely web-based, open to all, global virtual forums (even Yearly Kos is primarily physical attendance-based, right?); drop all the trappings of elitish academic/political/bureaucratic conferences (e.g. cocktail receptions and white papers); and, with regards to the substance of this conference, going from the total domination of GDP to dropping single indicators as a bad idea altogether.
Shouldn't we draw encouragement from the fact that such an establishment-based conference that formally and publicly (although without as much fanfare as it could have had) proposes to overturn the GDP monocracy?
Or do we throw out the baby of institutional evolution and stirrings for progress with the water of inevitable (yet temporary) intitutional inertia?
Put differently, do we compromise and work within and through the system trying to make incremental changes, or do we check out altogether and try to change things in our own self-initiated partnerships and communities outside established institutions? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
