“What has the Gates Foundation done for global health?”, was the topic of a debate at Britain’s Royal Society of the Arts on May 28th. The debate was inspired by a series of articles in the medical journal The Lancet (registration required) that highlighted the growing number of criticisms of the Gates Foundation’s efforts from […]
Capitalism is something of a dirty word at the moment, so the launch on March 24th of a new initiative to attract finance for capital-starved entrepreneurs in the developing world is a timely reminder that jobs and economic growth are the most powerful levers in ending poverty. The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) wants to create a […]
“Gratuitous and thoughtless” is how Dave McCoy wrongly sums up our characterisation of his views about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has posted a detailed comment on our previous post “Attacking Gates” (you can read both here), where we discuss the Global Health Watch 2 report. We disagree with Dave, and the GHW2 report, […]
One of the highlights of the business calendar is Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway. This is always beautifully written, full of the great investor’s wisdom and wit. There are usually some funny quotes from unlikely sources, as well as a few examples of how the world is going wrong […]
Bill Gates has just finished reading Philanthrocapitalism – and he says he likes it! Gates told Matthew yesterday in a meeting (more about which in future blog posts) that “your book is good. Anyone who reads it will learn a lot about what is going on.” He had two main criticisms. First, that in our […]
Barack Obama once ran the Chicago arm of the Annenberg Challenge, a $500m effort to improve schools in America funded by media tycoon Walter Annenberg. It was there that he came into contact with Bill Ayers, the Weatherman terrorist, a relationship that caused controversy during the recent election campaign. Less controversially, coming into contact with […]
Congratulations to Wikipedia. The free online encylopedia has just exceeded the $6m target it set for its recent fundraising effort. A thank you letter from its inspirational founder, Jimmy Wales, noted that “This campaign has proven that Wikipedia matters to its users, and that our users strongly support our mission: to bring free knowledge to […]
The need for philanthropy to be accountable to society, as part of a new social contract between the wealthy and the rest of society, is one of the main themes of our book. As we observe in the introduction, “if philanthrocapitalists are to be a legitimate part of the solution to the world’s problems, a […]