Economic thought bites create a good barney and a tome of half-baked ideas

BOOK REVIEW: KARLIN LILLINGTONreviews Creative Capitalismby Michael Kinsley; Simon Schuster; 336pp; £17 (€19)

IT SEEMS to be all the rage these gloomy economic days, to talk about ways to make capitalism soft and fluffy and adorable. Cut-throat characters like Salesforce.com founder and chief executive Marc Benioff, raised in the School of Oracle Hard Knocks and no stranger to the notion of crushing the competition cruelly underfoot, have been there and done that and named the book Compassionate Capitalism, launched by Benioff in 2004 at that annual shrine to capitalism, the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Later to the game has come Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who coined the term “creative capitalism” in his swan song speech at Davos last year before he stepped down from Microsoft’s helm (what is it about Davos that makes these fellows bust out in philanthropic zeal, anyway? Guilt and embarrassment at how much money, socked away in offshore hideaways, is represented in the flesh by the attendees?).

To be fair to Gates – and for that matter, Benioff and other well-heeled entrepreneurs looking to inspire people to give of their time and money – he has certainly, literally and liberally, put his own money where his mouth is.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the wealthiest philanthropic organisation on the planet, endowed not just with Bill’s considerable billions, but Warren Buffett’s as well. When the world’s wealthiest guys get together, mountains can be moved, and Gates has chosen to do this in a particularly admirable way, pledging his money to tackle two health scourges, malaria and tuberculosis.

These diseases are generally ignored by the capitalist side of Big Pharma because not enough money can be made from the developing world markets where they are a leading cause of suffering and death.

In other words – those of Gates himself – “economic demand is not the same as economic need”.

Taking that notion as his theme, he then argued for a “creative capitalism”, where market forces could drive change. He described this as “an approach where governments, businesses and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities”.

Lest he be accused of growing soft now that he’s made his own multibillions, he defended the notion by calling upon none other than Adam Smith for the father of capitalism’s observation that, curiously, people tend to have some innate sense of humanitarianism even when it doesn’t benefit them materially.

And indirectly, he defended Microsoft’s own, often criticised approach of dismissing others’ attempts to introduce low-cost laptops running free open source software into the developing world, while flogging cheaper versions of Windows, all the better to capture the global markets of tomorrow.

At Davos, Gates noted that Microsoft itself has a major corporate philanthropy programme, but “making computing more accessible and more affordable”, in order “to find markets that are already there but untapped”, is really at the heart of his notion of creative capitalism and, sceptics could say, just a nice way of saying “business as usual in Redmond”.

But I think that would be doing Gates a disservice – unless you fervently belief the revolution is nigh and that smart economy workers of the world are about to unite in the cause of getting Word and PowerPoint out to the African masses. Assuming this isn’t about to happen anytime soon, the thorny problem then is how to create a functional “hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others”, as Gates was annoyingly vague on exactly what he meant, or how it could be done.

In Creative Capitalism, journalist and political commentator Michael Kinsley throws the question out to a gallery of 40 commentators who have a good barney in bite-size contributions drawn together from their original online format. Some like the idea, some think it wishy washy, many try to get to grips with what it might be.

All of this is interesting and often lively and incisive reading if sometimes self-indulgent and occasionally smacking of Pseud’s Corner.

It also all seems a bit contrived, which I think in part is due to trying to stuff a live online dialogue between covers, and calling it a book.

The volume is rather misleadingly subtitled, in very large print, “Essays by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett” and in far smaller print “and Others” when neither Gates nor Buffet offer essays at all.

Gates’ formal contribution is a copy of his speech, and Buffett only appears in an edited transcript of a discussion with Gates, recorded by Kinsley at Gates’ home. Neither ever re-engages with their ideas by responding to the other contributors.

The fact that Kinsley is also former editor of (widely respected) Microsoft-owned online magazine Slate, and is married to the former CEO of the Gates Foundation, also casts this project as a bit of a tech business luvvie-fest (though Kinsley is acerbic enough about the speech).

All in all, though, some good reading on a topical question, though I’d have preferred proper essays, not economic thought bites, and real participation by Gates himself.