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which we’d reached, money has no further value. It can’t bring happiness, but it can save or transform many lives.” He said he had wanted to help children since he had worked as a young man in the Philippines, where he saw kids as young as five scouring garbage dumps for food. Jamie told me they were also “concerned about the values our own children grow up with. We want them to be kind, to care about others and give them dignity, to make good things happen.” They both said their good fortune was due in part to when and where they were born, not entirely due to their own ability, and therefore they have a “moral obligation to balance the scale.” Chris and Jamie agree with Bill and Melinda Gates that “every life has equal value.” Therefore, they can’t be happy unless they act accordingly, and “we’d rather die happy than rich.” In other words, as Jamie said, quoting the great Texas humorist Jim Hightower, “I never saw a hearse pulling a U-Haul.”

Sterling Stamos, an investment firm with more than $3.5 billion under its management, combines its finance and philanthropy operations under the slogan “doing well by doing good.” Each year, approximately 10 percent of the general partners’ profits are allocated to social investment programs. Sterling Stamos’s Corporate Philanthropy section is overseen by two brothers: Chris Stamos, a partner and former COO of Sterling Stamos, is president, and Basil Stamos, a San Francisco physician who also works at a clinic serving a predominately homeless population, is chairman.

The primary focus of the Stamoses’ giving is global health. Because ten million children die each year of preventable, curable, and treatable diseases, they see global health as a “moral opportunity” and an undervalued asset that, if properly funded, could yield a huge social benefit as well as an economic return on investment.

The first large commitment they made was to the Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia with one of the highest rates of HIV, a high infant mortality rate, and a very high rate of amputees, the awful legacy of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule in the 1970s and the land mines they left behind.

Late in 2006, I visited the hospital with Chris and Basil. It was founded in 1999 as a pediatric teaching hospital by the NGO Friends Without a Border. The Stamos brothers are the primary donors to the hospital, which sees 300 to 400 children every day and trains about 800 government health workers and students every year. While the current director is an expatriate, 98 percent of the staff is Cambodian. The Stamos brothers got involved in our HIV/AIDS Initiative in order to secure quality children’s ARVs at low prices and to help scale up the treatment program. The hospital has provided care and treatment to more than 370 children with AIDS.

After Chris Stamos accompanied me on a trip to Africa, Sterling Stamos also committed $250,000 to our work in Rwanda with Partners In Health.

Why do the Stamos brothers do it? They clearly love their philanthropic work, but they also believe that it’s good business. Chris says, “Ideas are what change the world, and ‘meaning’ is the greatest undervalued asset in the marketplace of ideas.” He says that at Sterling Stamos, philanthropy adds to staff morale and productivity, gives clients a greater sense of fulfillment, and increases the firm’s financial capital through the appeal of good works and the stimulation of intellectual capital. Like Chris Hohn and Jamie Cooper-Hohn, Chris and Basil Stamos are still young, with big plans for the future, including an expansion of their health efforts into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the establishment of the Archimedes Fund to invest the funds of other NGOs, family foundations, and endowments for greatly reduced fees, and in so doing increase dramatically the amount of wealth available for philanthropy.

Lance Armstrong is convinced that in addition to world-class care, he survived his battle with cancer because of the physical fitness, mental toughness, and positive attitude