One world dept.; dreams of Davos.(World Econiomic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, to New York City)(The Talk of the Town)

Last Wednesday evening, the night before the World Economic Forum's annual meeting got under way, Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder, and George Soros, the financier, held a party at the headquarters of the Open Society Institute, on West Fifty-ninth Street. The party was to honor forty "social entrepreneurs," individuals who have chosen to apply themselves not to increasing their personal wealth but to alleviating social problems -- AIDS in Africa, orphans in India -- that have traditionally been left to woollier, not-for-profit types. Social entrepreneurialism is in vogue right now: if you are in business school, this is what you want to do, just as three years ago you wanted to start a dot-com. The forum had been moved to New York this year from its usual location, in Davos, Switzerland, and it was the first time that such a group had been invited to join the capitalist potentates who are the forum's more typical participants. The entrepreneurs seemed rather like a bunch of cool new kids who'd been bused into a suburban high school and were exotically subverting the social hierarchy.

"This is the first time we can remember going to a cocktail party in New York and not knowing anyone," said Cynthia Brill, who was with her husband, the publisher Steve Brill. "We were just saying that this is such a phenomenal city that it can simply swallow Davos."

Steve Brill was smiling approachably at passersby. "Who are all these people?" he said. "I don't know anyone here except George. I'm sure that if I knew who all these people were I'd be impressed. That tall guy over there is probably the Alan Greenspan of Finland. The Steve Brill of Monrovia could be here, and I wouldn't know it. I'd be too shy to ask."

As it turned out, the social entrepreneurs had ideas even more out of the box than starting courtroom-based cable-TV channels or media-business magazines. There was James Price Chuck, a young economist from Chicago, whose organization, Knitting Together Nations, markets knitwear produced by Bosnian women to designers such as Agnes B. and Edina Ronay. "You take Old World skills and New World design, and you have got the best product on the block," Chuck said, his ...