I babbled about philanthropy in an earlier posting called “Wealth now, philanthropy later”, so I was thrilled to see this blog posting on the Harvard Business Review website:

Steve Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist

Try to ignore the hyperbolic title of the article and just absorb the content.

Making the world a better place means making decisions your whole life that either incrementally or substantially make people’s lives better. People dislike hearing that investing in a promising new company could potentially have more of an impact on the world that the more common charitable action of, say, donating food to starving children.… Read the rest

Seeing this latest monument to Bill Gates’ ego reminded me of the following quote from the book Slow Money by Woody Tasch:

“Wealth now, philanthropy later” is an inappropriate response to the challenges of the 21st century.

It has long bothered me that born-again philanthropists are lauded for their contributions for society, while ignoring all the suffering they caused and damage they’ve done to the environment. Suddenly they got old enough (or guilty enough) to start being concerned about their legacy.… Read the rest