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the first five years of life. “When my parents set up the three foundations for my brothers and me in late 1999, I decided that I wanted to work with the Omaha Public Schools,” Buffett told me. “I went to see Dr. Mackiel, the superintendent, and told him that I had this money and wanted him to think about what we could do with it. He said, ‘Don’t give it to me. Figure out who is doing the best work in early childhood and do something for the poorest kids so that they enter kindergarten prepared.’ ” The result, Building Bright Futures, is a nonprofit seeking to “improve academic performance, raise graduation rates, increase civic and community responsibility and ensure that all students are prepared for post-secondary education by developing partnerships with existing providers and creating new evidence-based programs to develop a comprehensive, community-based network of services.”141

As we struggle to return our economy to full capacity, we also need to make sure that our communities are operating at full capacity: Our full capacity of giving. Our full capacity of service. Our full capacity of compassion.

EMPATHY FOR THE (BE)DEVIL(ED)

In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin describes empathy as “the willingness of an observer to become part of another’s experience, to share the feeling of that experience.”

Unlike sympathy, which is passive, empathy is active, engaged, and dynamic. New scientific data tells us that empathy is not a quaint behavior trotted out during intermittent visits to a food bank or during a heart-tugging telethon.142 Instead, it lies at the very core of human existence.

Since the economic crisis, the role empathy plays in our lives has only grown more important. In fact, in this time of economic hardship, political instability, and rapid technological change, empathy is the one quality we most need if we’re going to flourish in the twenty-first century. “An individual,” said Martin Luther King, “has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his own individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”143

In the fall of 2009, the Huffington Post published a story about Monique Zimmerman-Stein, a mother who suffers from Stickler syndrome, a rare genetic condition that leads to blindness. Though almost completely blind, she abandoned the treatments that might have saved her eyesight so that she and her husband could afford medical care for their two daughters, who were also diagnosed with the disorder.144 The regular injections Monique needed cost $380 each, even after the family’s insurance paid its share, and she and her husband were already drowning in medical debt. Sacrificing her own treatment, she said, was “a choice any mom would make.”

The Stein family’s story struck a chord with readers, many of whom wrote asking how they could help.145 In response, we designed a fund-raising widget, providing readers who wanted to contribute to the Steins a quick and easy way to give. Within a week, we had raised more than $30,000 to help the family pay down its medical bills. “I was flabbergasted, overwhelmed, overcome,” Monique said of the donations. “So many people are having a hard time. The fact that they would give something to us is an amazing gift.” Gary, Monique’s husband, echoed her gratitude. “We’ll do whatever we can to pay it forward,” he said.

“We are on the cusp of an epic shift,” writes Jeremy Rifkin.146 “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy.” He makes the case that as technology is increasingly connecting us to one another, we need to understand what the goal of all this connectivity is. “Seven billion individual connections,” he says, “absent any overall unifying purpose, seem a colossal waste of human energy.”147

That sense of purpose, which must include expanding the narrow confines of our own concerns, can have powerful social implications. Dr. King showed that for a social movement to become broad-based enough to produce real change, it must be fueled by empathy.

In his 1963 work “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King