Philanthrocapitalism | Matthew Bishop and Michael Green

Here is where the first problem emerges with Bishop’s and Green’s book, perceptive and well written though it is. The authors are unabashed fans of the philanthropists they profile, and sometimes their admiration prevents them from doing justice to the many criticisms of the trend.

They seem to have a particular crush on Bill Gates, relating a fawning anecdote of Gates’s addressing Harvard’s 2007 graduating class. ‘I do have one big regret,’ the IT genius reportedly confessed. ‘I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world.’ A couple of decades and antitrust cases later, he apparently began to grasp the magnitude of global injustice, spurring him to set up the foundation named after him and Melinda.

Bishop and Green focus on Gates’s newfound social conscience and miss the more obvious question. The guy got through Harvard without realising there’s inequality out there? And now he’s the poster child of poverty alleviation?

Obviously, objections are abundant. The most vehement come from those who think capitalism has perpetuated the very problems Gates and others purport to be tackling. Capitalism, as a system based on the accumulation of private property, thrives through restricting profits to an ever more exclusive minority. As a result, it can’t help but widen inequalities between rich and poor. Now philanthrocapitalists want to export this system to the one realm that previously took pride in divorcing itself from profit motivations: the world of charitable giving.

To such critics, praising someone like Gates for trying to narrow economic inequalities is like praising an arsonist for trying to hose down the house he’s just set fire to, then offering him a tax break and inviting him to your next fundraiser. In short, you couldn’t have picked a worse time to launch a book praising capitalism’s ability to clean up the non-profit world than today, when capitalism’s failures have never been more evident.