Kristof:
Bill and Melinda Gates are among the best things that have happened to Africa, and not just because of the sums of money that they have donated. Just as important, they have brought a serious business mindset to philanthropy and development, and an expectation that “do-gooders” should be cost-effective and rely on metrics to prove their performance.
Early this year in Davos, Gates gave a speech calling for “creative capitalism” to address the needs of the very poor:
Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book -- a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.
This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we'll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary -- the comments posted on this blog -- will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of "capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool" probably won't be used. But we're genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)
No comments:
Post a Comment