llustration: Liu Rui/GT

When the world's wealthiest and most powerful people gather, you can bet there will be some enlightening moments for the rest of us. This year's World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos was one such gathering. The audience at the forum or watching from afar may still be talking about the punch lines that impressed them the most, be it Alibaba founder Jack Ma's confession that his application to be a student at Harvard was declined 10 times before he founded his company and became one of the richest people in the world, or Google chairman Eric Schmidt's prediction that the Internet will "disappear."

But I am curious whether many ideas coming out of there could really help alleviate the problem highlighted as a theme of the forum, or how many people still remember the theme.

It's not that the organizers haven't seemingly tried. The discussion points released before the meeting focused on the widening income gap. And they invited Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of the anti-poverty group Oxfam International, to co-chair the meeting.

Yes, the world portrayed in Oxfam's research, a world in which 80 people on the top of the wealth pyramid have a combined wealth that is the same as the 3.5 billion people in the bottom half, sounds scary. But when the top 1 percent, or probably 0.1 percent, are taking private jets to a picturesque and extremely expensive resort to talk about the struggles of the 99 percent, and cannot reach a consensus on supporting a tax hike for themselves, I cannot help doubting how much they can help.

Some of the rich do want to show that they care. Some of them did so by attending a two-hour role-playing program in which they taste the lives of refugees or slum dwellers and have to conduct practical tasks such as finding food or building a hut. The organizer, Hong Kong-based group Crossroads Foundation, has been offering this program for years in various formats and boasts that some CEOs end with tears in their eyes and ask how they can help.

To walk a mile in an unlucky man's shoes have become a trend among the lucky in recent years. In the US, many politicians and other public figures have participated in the "food stamp challenge," in which they try to live for a week or two on the monetary equivalent of what a poor person would receive from the federal food stamps program. In 2013, during the mayoral campaign in New York, a few major candidates had a sleepover in the homes of public housing tenants. In China, some rich parents also like to send their children to rural areas in the summer to get a different life experience, living among people who are often finding it tough to survive, let alone thrive.

These kinds of activities help to raise awareness because of their guaranteed appeal to the media. But it will be naive for the participants as well as their audiences to believe what they experience is in any way what poverty and inequality really feels like.

Poverty doesn't really show its fangs when you have to stretch the pennies for a few days, but when you are so worn out that you feel sick, when you know your paycheck won't last the month and your kids may be without food, the only way you can get to work, is towed away because you didn't keep up with the credit payments. The stress accumulates and there seems no way out of a vicious cycle.

Researchers in the US have found that children in rich families perform better at school than those just as talented from poor families. The wealthy kids end up going to better colleges, and then land in better paid jobs. And poor children, when they grow up, are most likely to stay in the same income bracket as their parents. This is a major accelerator of the income gap.

The interactive role-playing game, in which the dimension of time is condensed into hours or weeks, pushes the wrong buttons by focusing on the short term. And when you have to buy a ticket to participate and are able to pull out of the game early if you feel you've gotten enough, the questionable nature of these teaching moments is there for all to see.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com