Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [2]
Martin Luther King once said, “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve.” I wrote this book to profile some great people and to encourage you to join their ranks.
ONE
The Explosion of Private Citizens Doing Public Good
IN EVERY CORNER of America and all over the world, intelligence and energy are evenly distributed, but opportunity, investment, and effective organizations aren’t. As a result, billions of people are denied the chance to live their lives to the fullest, and millions die needlessly every year.
Because we live in an interdependent world, we cannot escape each other’s problems. We are all vulnerable to terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of disease, and the potentially calamitous effects of climate change. The fact that one in four people who die this year will succumb to AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or infections related to dirty water casts a pall over all our children’s future. As long as more than 100 million children in poor countries are not enrolled in school, there will be political and social instability, with global implications. There is a growing backlash against the global economy in both rich and poor nations where the economic growth it has stimulated has not been broadly shared. About half the world’s people still live on less than $2 a day. In the United States we have had five years of economic growth, worker productivity increases, and a forty-year high in corporate profits, but median wages are flat, and the poverty rate among working families has risen, as has the percentage of people without health insurance. Increased outsourcing of production and services has intensified insecurity. Most of the economic gains of this decade have gone to those people with the top 10 percent of incomes. And amidst all our wealth, there are people who are hungry, homeless, jobless, ill, disabled, desperate, isolated, and ignored. There are children with dreams that will die without a helping hand.
The modern world, for all its blessings, is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable. And so the great mission of the early twenty-first century is to move our neighborhoods, our nation, and the world toward integrated communities of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a shared sense of genuine belonging, based on the essence of every successful community: that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.
Many of the problems that bedevil both rich and poor nations in the modern world cannot be adequately addressed without more enlightened government policies, more competent and honest public administration, and more investment of tax dollars. There is plenty of evidence that more effective government can produce higher incomes, better living conditions, more social justice, and a cleaner environment across the board. But in many areas, regardless of the quality of government, a critical difference is being made by citizens working as individuals, in businesses, and through nongovernmental nonprofit organizations. An NGO is any group of private citizens who join together to advance the public good.
When I left the White House in 2001, I hoped that through my foundation I could make such a difference and keep working to move our nation and the world away from poverty, disease, conflict, and climate change. I wanted to use my time, experience, and contacts to help in saving lives, solving problems, and empowering more people to achieve their goals.
For example, in 2002 the Clinton Foundation launched an HIV/AIDS initiative (CHAI), to help developing nations deal with AIDS by setting up