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.

There are five "conceptual pillars" to this year's forum, the theme of which is "The Power of Collaborative Innovation." The gathering, from January 23 to 27, will take place against a background of deteriorating economies around the world and increasingly-fraught international geopolitical uncertainty, especially in the nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The first pillar, "competing while collaborating," will look at everything from the disruptive effects of the internet to the ongoing war against corruption.

The second, "addressing economic insecurity," will review at global credit and derivatives markets, and ask how newly empowered actors such as sovereign wealth funds and massively capitalized private-equity firms are changing the way the world does business.

The third pillar, "aligning interests across divides," looks for global solutions to seemingly-intractable problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and spiraling healthcare costs.

The fourth pillar, "exploring nature's new frontiers," helps bring the world's most interesting scientists into contact with the politicians and businessmen who can benefit from their work.

The fifth, "understanding future shifts," looks at how a 21st century economy increasingly dominated by Chinese, Arabs, and Hindus will differ from its predecessor.

The trick for participants is to concentrate on those areas they know the least about. In that way they learn the most, don't get bored, and meet the kind of people they would never normally encounter.

The concentration of wealth and privilege in Davos each year disgusts many, and innovations such as the Open Forum, co-organized by the World Economic Forum and the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, have done little to alleviate such concerns.

(While the Open Forum is technically open to the public, the general public doesn't find it easy to travel to Davos during a week in which every last hotel has been booked solid for months.)

But the sheer amount of goodwill and hopefulness in Davos probably helps compensate for many of its excesses. If it didn't exist, there would probably be even more mutual incomprehension across countries and cultures than there already is.