Power Pal

I read a good article in the opinion section of the WSJ a couple days ago about corruption in the World Bank's dealing with Kenya. It's an interesting follow-up to my previous post about profit-motivated capitalism being better than philanthropy . The WSJ article highlights several recent examples of how money was being misused by both Kenyan officials and the World Bank themselves. It was that corruption that prompted Paul Wolfowitz in 2006 to withhold $260 million in lending to Kenya in an attempt to link future lending with guarentees of changes in Kenya. Wolfowitz was forced out and lending increased dramatically as he left. And of course, corruption did not abate in Kenya. The problem with disbursing funds without appropriate guarentees of change or oversight to ensure those changes are carried out is that it feeds a culture of corruption. And, as I've mentioned before, it's that corruption and lack of rule of law that is holding people back from helping th...

I love reading the editorial page of the WSJ. I came across an article a couple weeks back by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU, about how Bill Gates' recent push at Davos for what Gates called "creative capitalism" was, although admirable, not really going to help anyone. (It's a 36 min video, so it takes some time to watch). The main point that Gates makes in his speech is that traditional capitalism only benefits those that have money - i.e. those that can participate in the system at all. He was trying to push corporations to to look for innovative ways to incorporate the poorest people of the world into the global economy. He suggested that "recognition" might be one reason a company might want to do that. If companies are recognized for their philantropic works more, that's good PR and free marketing and would motivate them to do more. He used "tiered pricing" as another example for how they might go about it. For ...

Who knew you could buy the Magna Carta ? But apparently it was up for sale back in December last year. The only privately held copy was being sold by the Perot Foundation to raise money for medical research and other charitable reasons. Who would buy such a document? The co-founder of the Carlyle Group ... for $21.3 million! He was worried it would be purchased by someone outside the U.S. He's a quote: Mr. Rubenstein: I had read about it going on sale in a newspaper, and I thought it was surprising that the U.S. government wasn't buying it and that the National Archives didn't have the money to do it. I thought that maybe someone from outside the United States would buy it and thought, "Jeez, wouldn't it be a terrible thing if one of the most important documents in Western civilization were not available for Americans to see anymore?" Very admirable. Unfortunately, it wasn't on display when I visited the National Archives in late December.

I read this great article in the WSJ about how blogs and social networking sites are being used by 20-somethings to push and fund their favorite causes. The article mentions how people are using these sites to push out donation requests to all their friends in their network. I recently learned about how these Facebook applications work and I can definitely appreciate the potential here. All of these are donation related though. I'd be more interested in applications where you're getting people to do stuff in the real world. Still very cool though. The laundry list of different charitable donation sites was pretty interesting. I can't believe there are so many of them. I wonder if they'll all remain independent or if they'll consolidate at any point.