Time has come for closing arguments in our debate with Felix Salmon. In his final shot he offered up the typically provocative (and false) assertion that ‘Philanthrocapitalism coddles CEOs’. This came as a bit of a surprise, since we have written extensively about the failings of corporate bosses to grasp the scale of the challenge […]
Of all Felix Salmon’s many unjustified criticisms of our work (and this blog, like our books, is always written jointly), none is odder than his assertion in his latest attack (“Philanthropy Can’t Be Outsourced To A Profit Motive”) that “when corporate leaders listen to Altman and Bishop, then, they get the message that if they […]
In the good old days, when he used to write engaging articles about economics, the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman took on the urgent and pressing issue of how food in England got so bad and why it had suddenly got better. The problem, as he described it, was that the English had industrialised […]
Our recent blog post criticising Muhammad Yunus for his blanket criticism of for-profit investment in microlending has sparked a lively debate, especially in the Twittersphere. The influential @socialedge called the post “must read”. @andrewsprung called it a “pitch-perfect rebuttal to Yunus”. On the other hand, @KimberleyCanada protested “Oh pls. some respect. the man is brilliant […]
Philanthropy or capitalism? Nature or nurture? Butter or marmalade on your toast? False dichotomies make fun debating points but shed little light on important questions. So it is with Reuters blogger Felix Salmon’s recent critique of the new Financial Access at Birth (FAB) campaign as top down rather than bottom up. FAB is a simple idea: from 11 […]
British hedge-fund philanthropist Chris Cooper-Hohn and his wife Jamie have just announced another huge gift – of £495m ($812m) – to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), as Matthew has reported in The Economist. This took the assets of the foundation, which they created in 2003 to receive and give away a slice of the […]
So accused billionaire fraudster Sir Allen Stanford is “the original philanthrocapitalist”, according to the cover story of the latest issue of World Finance magazine. This is surely “cover of the year” says blogger Felix Salmon, and who can disagree? Though it must contend for cover of the decade with CFO magazine, which in successive years […]