January 25, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Bill Gates’s call for a new form of capitalism to assist the world’s
poor drew plenty of attention on nonprofit and political blogs.
Larry Kudlow, economics editor at National Review, chides Mr. Gates and his fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett as sounding like Karl Marx.
“Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn’t noticed, it was a miserable failure,” Mr. Kudlow writes on the magazine’s blog, The Corner.
Bill Gates, a closet socialist?
Not so, says Blake Hounshell, Web editor at Foreign Policy magazine, on the publication’s blog, Passport.
Mr. Hounshell points out that the software tycoon said he still firmly believes capitalism is the best economic system. And he writes that Mr. Gates’s ideas are not brand new but that he adopted them from several scholars and antipoverty advocates.
One of the experts Mr. Gates cited in his speech is C.K. Prahalad, a business professor and board member of the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington.
On the institute’s blog, Allen Hammond, the organization’s vice president for innovation, writes that he attended a dinner in Seattle where Mr. Prahalad explained to Mr. Gates how companies can lift the poorest of the poor out of poverty. Mr. Hammond writes that at the meeting Mr. Gates seemed rather skeptical, but apparently he has changed his mind.
“That is a major milestone in the evolving thinking of perhaps the most influential philanthropist of our time,” Mr. Hammond writes.
But while some nonprofit blogs hailed Mr. Gates speech as a call-to-arms, some question its timing; the Microsoft co-founder plans to step down from his position at the Redmond, Wash., company this summer to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full time.
Jeff Trexler, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Pace University, writes that Mr. Gates’s words would be more persuasive if he had more say in the technology company’s operations.
“For Gates’s appeal to have had substantial ripple effects, it really had to have been issued while he was in charge,” he writes on his blog, Uncivilsociety.
Lucy Bernholz, a nonprofit consultant, also raises questions about Mr. Gates’s career change on her blog, Philanthropy 2173.
Why is there so little “buzz” about his transition in the nonprofit world? she asks. “We’re only five months away from Bill Gates taking a full-time job in philanthropy (where his foundation is largest in terms of assets), and there is nary a peep from peers or others,” she writes.
What do you think of Mr. Gates’s call for “creative capitalism”? How will it affect nonprofit groups? Do you think that companies will heed his words? Click on the comments link below this post to share your thoughts.
