February 12, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
Creative Capitalism: A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Other Economic Leaders
edited by Michael Kinsley with Conor Clarke
Creative capitalism, as defined by Bill Gates at the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is “an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits 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.”
Mr. Gates’s remarks are the jumping-off point of this book, a collection of online discussions and essays organized and edited by Michael Kinsley, a journalist and pundit who started Slate magazine, with help from Conor Clarke, former editor at the Guardian newspaper.
In chapters of just two to four pages, economists, philanthropists, journalists, professors, and business leaders, including Mr. Gates and Warren Buffett, argue and parse a variety of questions born of Mr. Gates’s endorsement of creative capitalism. One early chapter is a transcription of a conversation in which Mr. Gates introduces his ideas to Mr. Buffett over a friendly lunch; in another chapter, Clive Crook, a columnist for the Financial Times and one who is skeptical of Mr. Gates’s concept, challenges him: “Prove it, and the idea will catch on fast.”
Because the book is a collection of writing that originated online, there is a lot of back-and-forth between contributors. For example, Alexander Friedman, chief financial officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, writes that by investing in certain projects, foundations may be able to avoid spending any actual money on them; in the following chapter, Steven Landsburg, a writer for National Journal, addresses Mr. Friedman as “Alex” and writes that “it does no good at all to pretend there’s such a thing as a free lunch.”
The book also contains essays from Matt Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley; and Lawrence Summers, a Harvard University professor who is now a top economic adviser to President Obama, among others.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020; (800) 331-6531; fax (800) 943-9831; http://www.simonsays.com; 336 pages; $26; ISBN 141659941X.
