At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January, dozens of senior officials from around the world sat alongside multinational CEOs, fresh off their private jets, and applauded Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for what they saw as speaking truth to power. Carney gave an address inspired by a 1978 essay by Vaclav Havel, who was then a Czech poet and Soviet dissident and later served as his country’s first president in the postcommunist era. The essay, titled “The