More than 35 years after it was first conceived by Klaus Schwab in 1971, the World Economic Forum's annual meeting at the small Swiss mountain town of Davos remains the biggest and most covered event of its kind.

It is often dismissed as a mere talking shop in which nothing ever gets done. This has been heard more often since President Bill Clinton and his Clinton Global Initiative have explicitly challenged the World Economic Forum to become more relevant.

But talk and conversation will always matter, and the idea of a talking shop will never completely go out of fashion -- certainly not as long as Davos continues to draw the A-list participants that it does.

This year's co-chairmen, for example, are former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, J.P. Morgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon, Henry Kissinger, and China Mobile Communications C.E.O. Wang Jianzhou.

There are world leaders, such as Gordon Brown of Britain and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan; Nobel laureates by the dozen; and many scores of C.E.O.'s who happily spend up to $50,000 apiece for the privilege of being able to mingle for five days with other power brokers and learn a little more about how the world works.

It is, for them, money well spent. Many can fit in more high-level meetings in the five days of Davos than they normally hold in five months of jet-setting. This is the one time each year that the world's most important men and women make every effort to be in the same place at the same time.

Newcomers often leave utterly exhausted; veterans embrace the impossibility of doing everything and make sure to carve out time to learn about the offbeat or just to blow off steam on the town's famous ski slopes.

The scheduled sessions run from breakfast to midnight every day. They address big macroeconomic themes, but lots of smaller, quirkier topics, too: The "new age of technonationalism," say, or the way that science is changing the way we look at love and art.