1) “A battle is going to rage over the relationship between profit and philanthropy.” And some. Within days of making this prediction, Muhammad Yunus launched a swingeing attack on the microfinance movement that he inspired, accusing many of thosewho have followed in his footsteps of charging extortionate interest rates to their clients to satisfy their for-profit shareholders. We thought that this attack, which we likened to devouring his own children, was unworthy of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and has if anything helped the politically-motivated attacks on microfinance institutions like SKS in India. (We were also saddened and angered by the Bangladeshi Government’s attacks on Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank that he founded.)

2) We predicted a “growing trend towards the privatisation of aid”, as the fiscal problems of the rich world made cuts in official aid budgets almost inevitable. With the honourable exception of Britain, which (to our surprise) is sticking to its plan to increase aid to 0.7% of national income, those cuts have started to happen. That’s why ‘innovative financing for development’ has been a buzz-phrase of the year. For many campaigners this means the Robin Hood Tax, an idea that we think is well-intentioned but wrong, which was half-endorsed by Bill Gates in a special report for the G20 summit meeting in November where he offered a set of ideas on how to plug the global aid funding gap. Yet what was most interesting in the Gates report was not his ideas for fiscal policy but a set of suggestions about how a third of the money needed could be raised from private rather than public sources. We thought the proposals needed more work but the fact that the governments of world’s biggest economic powers need help from private citizens marks a significant shift in how the world tackles problems. Earlier in the year we had argued that the new public-private partnerships formed around causes like eradicating malaria represent the rise of the posse as the new organisational form in international relations. That analysis was reinforced by a new intergovernmental declaration on aid effectiveness made in Busan, South Korea, in November which officially put private actors centre-stage in global development for the first time.

3) “Quality of giving will become just important an issue as quantity”. That has been true of the aid world in general, where one of the highlights of the year was Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s book ‘Poor Economics’. We hope that the conversion of some of our past critics, like Phil Buchanan at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, to the idea that philanthropic (and, indeed, public) investments should be based on rigorous evidence is a sign that the battle is now won. We were also heartened this year that both ‘Alliance’ magazine and the development boffins at the Institute of Development Studies have finally joined us in taking seriously questions about the effectiveness of foundations, and of Gates Foundation in particular.

4) We thought that the ‘hot topics’ for 2011 would be “school reform” in the US and “maternal and child health”. Our American prediction was spot on, where Diane Ravitch has been leading a backlash against the involvement of philanthrocapitalists in school reform. This is a sometimes ugly battle and one that involves getting stuck into politics, which is a sweetspot where effective philanthropy can make a big difference. On the global front we have to admit that, although there has been some progress, there has not been as big a push as we had hoped on maternal and child health, which is a tough problem linked to health systems and, crucially, the political will of developing countries’ own leaders.

5) “The most interesting country to watch in 2011 is going to be Britain,” we thought, because of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda. Though this idea has left voters largely underwhelmed, Britain’s experiments with social investment are genuinely world-leading, from the social impact bond pilots to the new Big Society Capital social investment fund (which has just received a green light from the European Commission that could have blocked the deal on competition grounds as an illegal state subsidy). So far, however, the debate on giving in the UK has been rather disappointing, with a rather mediocre government White Paper as the main action. We are still optimistic, however, that Prime Minister Cameron’s foundering flagship idea has helped to spark a wave of innovation in philanthropy that will bear fruit in the next year.

6) “The relationship between taxation and philanthropy is also going to be pushed front of stage in 2011.” This has certainly been the case in the US, where a cut to the federal tax deduction for charitable gifts is still part of draft legislation to balance the budget. We oppose such a cut, but we do think that a serious debate is needed about how to ensure that any tax subsidy increases effective giving. Most of the nonprofit community looks at any talk about changing the tax subsidy to philanthropy, apart from increasing it, with horror. We think that this is a mistake. In this age of fiscal austerity, no part of society can simply ask for more subsidy. Nor is there much evidence that more tax breaks will lead directly to more (or, perish the thought, better) philanthropy. We have certainly tried to get the debate going in Britain that the generous tax treatment now available for philanthropy should come, at least, with a requirement that foundations should make a minimum payout each year of 5% of the value of their endowments. That the US already applies such a rule is, we believe, an argument that this is practical and possible.

7) Our call for more philanthropy to help tackle the deprivation and injustice that feeds extremism in the Muslim world was inspired by the then forthcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was offered more in a spirit of hope than optimism, since philanthropy has all too often found working in Arab countries or Pakistan to be ‘too difficult’. So we have been surprised and heartened by the events of 2011. And we are not talking about the killing of Osama bin-Laden. Rather it is the unfinished revolutions of the Arab Spring that have brought unexpected change to North Africa and the Gulf, popular movements in which social media has played an important contributory role. Philanthrocapitalists, especially local ones, played a role, and need to play a yet bigger one, to ensure that these revolutions achieve their full potential.

“Celebrity philanthropy will continue to boom.” Yes, it did. There is still no sign of Tiger Woods turning in a big way to philanthropy to redeem his tattered reputation, as we had predicted for 2010. Ashton Kutcher took a step or two backwards. But the year saw some big advances by some new kids in celanthropy, including Lady Gaga and Edward Norton, whilst experienced hands such as Bono, Angelina Jolie and Shakira each continued to develop their impressive philanthrocapitalistic brands.

9) “Mass philanthrocapitalism will increasingly turn to politics.” The most inspiring movement of the year, in the developed world, was the #Occupy protests that challenged the titans of Wall Street and the City of London to prove that capitalism should serve the 99% of humanity, not just the wealthy 1%. Agreed, #Occupy has been better at channelling anger than coming up with programmes of reform. Yet, as we argue in The Road From Ruin, real change in how our economy is run is only going to come if citizens exercise their power as savers and investors to demand a version of capitalism that focuses on creating long term value, not merely a fast buck. To continue to porogress, #Occupy needs a clearer agenda, which we believe should be philanthrocapitalism.

10) We finished with a provocation that “maybe, just maybe, 2011 will be the year when social enterprise jumps the shark.” Not that we had anything against social entrepreneurs, it was just that the term had become “so ubiquitous and now seems to cover everything from for-profit businesses that claim to have a conscience to old-school charities that you have to ask if it means anything at all.” Certainly social enterprise was overtaken in 2011 by a new range of buzzwords that tried to get a bit more granular about the process of social innovation and scaling. “Impact investing” was probably the hottest idea of the year, as everyone got excited about the potential of what JP Morgan at the end of 2010 had said would be a trillion dollar market in for-profit investing with significant and measurable social or environmental side effects. 2011 did not, however, see tens of billions of dollars of impact investing deals. Whether this new type of business really will fulfil its potential is still to be proven and, we believe, it will only really take off when it moves out of the ghetto of the existing responsible investing community and into mainstream finance. Indeed, the need for big financial institutions to take impact investing seriously was one of our reflections on the other big idea of the year – management guru Michael Porter’s ‘shared value’ concept. Porter, with his partner Mark Kramer, put forward this new terminology to describe how profit and social impact are not in conflict, even for big businesses. Similar ideas have been heard before about how for-profit businesses can ‘do well by doing good’ (including Jed Emerson’s ‘blended value’, and indeed in our chapter on ‘The Good Company’ in ‘Philanthrocapitalism’) but the endorsement of a big hitter like Porter marked a step forward and the idea did seem to be taken seriously by, at least, some business leaders.

So, not a bad year for us as seers. How will we do in 2012? Our predictions, we predict, will appear here shortly.

Every year since the Gleneages summit, Bono’s lobbying organisation, the One Campaign, has published the DATA report, in which it grades the generosity of the rich world. The commitments made at Gleneagles ran to 2010, so this year’s report will be the last. “The G7 are on track to deliver a $13.7 billion increase, or 61% of the development assistance increases promised”, is the good news (well, a B is a pretty good grade for governments).

Top of the class is the UK, which under Tony Blair’s leadership at Gleneagles joined Bono and friends to gang up on the (other) heads of state and shake them down for more aid cash. The US, Canada and Japan all get a pat on the head for meeting or exceeding pledges that were, the report says pointedly, “modest”. Germany and France are acknowledged for making some improvement yet also chided for their boastfulness, as they only stumped up a quarter of what they promised.

Bottom of the class comes Italy, which the DATA Report does not even give a pass mark for effort. “Italy is an utter failure as a member of the G7,” says headteacher Bono, unequivocally.

As he looks forward in the report, Bono does his best to be optimistic. “We’ve come pretty far, having passed (maybe mostly) through the fog of financial crisis,” he writes in his foreword. Given that three members of the G7 have spent the past few weeks fighting off the implosion of the Euro it seems that the financial crisis has ‘mostly maybe’ passed rather than ‘maybe mostly’. Worse, even if the Eurozone does avoid meltdown that does not mean good news for aid.

When the DATA report warns of “a new debt crisis” round the corner, you have to wonder whether it’s talking about the rich or the poor world, or, indeed, both. The public debt of the donor countries has spiralled during the current economic crisis and with taxpayers on a fiscal crash diet it’s hard to see even current levels of generosity to the needy abroad being sustained.

The tragic irony, of course, is that evidence is filtering through that the aid splurge of the past five years may have started to achieve something. Two hundred million bednets have been distributed since 2006, cutting deaths from malaria by half in some African countries. The number of people with HIV in Africa receiving anti-retroviral drugs has gone up from 100,000 in 2003 to 3 million today. Another 42 million kids are enrolled in school. But that evidence is unlikely to have much of an impact on governments pondering whether to cut spending on things that directly benefit their own voters to pay for aid to non-voters in other countries.

Like it or not, we have to find new ways of making the aid money go further and find new ways of financing development that do not depend on the political will of a few rich countries. Philanthrocapitalism, by tapping the expertise, creatvity, money and other resources of the private sector, has to be central to a new development strategy. First, to pilot and test ideas to make aid smarter and more effective. Second, to leverage more private capital – full for-profit, ethical investment and donations – to fill the gap.

As we have argued before, this means thinking about aid not as the exclusive preserve of government but as a partnership with philanthrocapitalists, rich and less rich alike. This challenge is urgent and the rich countries are being slow to take it up - Britain’s new government, in particular, seems set on business as usual (although there are plenty of disgruntled voices on the right who would like to see an axe taken to the aid budget).

Yet there are some tentative signs that things are starting to change. Women’s Ministers from the Commonwealth countries will be looking at philanthrocapitalism as part of their meeting next month (where Michael will be speaking) on putting gender equity at the top of the development agenda. And new USAID Administrator and Gates Foundation veteran Raj Shah will be charged with building more partnerships with private organisations, if a recent leaked strategy document is to be believed, which it should be.

As he recuperates and ponders the last five years, Bono can take pride in the way he has pushed governments to increase what they spend on aid. He may shed a tear for the passing of that era but something new is now needed. Hopefully he will soon find what he’s looking for.

“Investing in new vaccines against malaria is great, but there’s no vaccine against poverty, inequality, violence or corruption,” Michael complains. He bemoans the focus on the easiest, most immediate problems. Instead he wants to “pour the generosity of the rich and famous into national development funds under democratic control.” (As well as backing the fundamentally flawed Robin Hood Tax).

This is all good, crowd-pleasing stuff for Michael’s supporters who don’t like capitalism but it is inaccurate and empty. Inaccurate, because philanthrocapitalists are working not just on vaccines but also on the fundamental issues of citizen empowerment, democracy, transparency, accountability, peace-building and anti-corruption that are so dear to his heart. (He even approvingly cites a report from the Center for Global Development, which relies heavily on funding from philanthrocapitalists, including its co-founder Ed Scott, who also partnered with Bill Gates and George Soros to seed-finance Bono’s campaigning organisation.) Empty, because he fails to acknowledge the flaws in the government and NGO-led aid model that he champions – the system that has manifestly failed over the last fifty years.

Tackling poverty needs more than warm words about the importance of civil society. It needs innovation and implementation. We are optimistic about philanthrocapitalism (which, in contrast to Michael’s caricature of it as all about the rich and business, is often manifested in partnerships betwen the wealthy, government, business and social entrpreneurs and non-profits) because we think it can deliver in those areas, bringing new ideas, testing them, and making them work in a way that has not been possible in the past. Philanthrocapitalism needs challenge to succeed, but that challenge should be based on evidence not tired old polemics.

Michael likes to describe philanthrocapitalism as “Just Another Emperor” sporting non-existent new clothes, but increasingly the evidence suggests it is he who is naked.

Certainly, the idea is elegantly simple: a small 0.05% tax on the banks’ speculative shifting of capital around the world will free up huge sums of money for the fight against poverty and climate change. And the only people who will have to pay will be the banks – which will thus be unable to pay their employees such obscenely large bonuses. What’s not to love? It’s like free money, only better, given the added feel-good element of banker bashing! No wonder people are signing up in droves – a poll on the campaign website says that supporters outnumber opponents ten to one.

The campaign for the Robin Hood Tax reunites the dream team that successfully bullied the G8 into big aid pledges in 2005 – Bono’s lobbying organisation, One, the British Government (which first tried floating the tax idea to the G20, which was unenthusiastic, before turning to lobbying), with endorsements from philanthrocapitalists such as Warren Buffett and George Soros.

Yet, a ’tiny’ tax that yields such huge sums sounds suspiciously like turning lead into gold, or some other fiscal alchemy.

So who will actually pick up the bill for this new tax? The banks, say the campaigners, by eating into their profits. ‘Good’, we hear you say. Except that the banks, in all probability, will just pass the costs on to consumers, so we will pay the tax, not the banks. And, on the other hand, if profits did fall, that would hit bank shareholders, who include many ordinary citizens, through their (already diminished) pension funds.

The tax would also make it more expensive for banks to move money around. Again, a good thing, you might think: when the idea for this tax was first floated in the 1970s by the Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin, he saw it less as a fundraising tool and more as a way to ‘throw sand in the wheels’ of financial speculation. That is why Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel Prize winning economist is supporting the tax. Yet no evidence is presented by the Robin Hood advocates that their tax will make the financial system safer and, while it is faddish to see flows of capital as merely negative speculation, there is a decent case to be made that the free movement of capital is an essential part of the global economy. Taxing these transactions, without clear evidence that it can be done safely, risks throwing sand in the wheels of global prosperity, which would be bad for all of us, especially those on the fringes of the financial system – the poor. The potential risks and costs need to be debated properly, not wished away.

The One/Make Poverty History campaign of 2005 was, as we describe in the book, a great example of high-leverage philanthropy, as philanthrocapitalists allied themselves with celanthropists and activist campaigning groups to champion more public spending on aid. In doing so, it gave ordinary people an opportunity show that they wanted more of their taxes spent on helping the poor (and, by extension, less on other things like schools, roads and guns). It improved the public decision making process. The Robin Hood campaign, by contrast, is encouraging people to vote for a free lunch - the one thing that economics has proved does not exist. Not complicated. Not brilliant. Not honest.

Gazing into our crystal ball, we see philanthrocapitalism continuing to surge ahead as givers and governments realise that philanthropy is going to be the driver of much of the social innovation that tackles the symptoms and causes of our current economic mess. This surge in activity will be increasingly controversial, as philanthrocapitalists take on more challenges that are inherently political, at home and overseas. So, recognising that most of these forecasts will be wrong (though we can only hope!), here are our specific predictions for the year ahead.

1) A wave of mega-gifts from a new cohort of American philanthrocapitalists. In the United States, the IT sector has created scores of billionaires, some of whom have got the giving bug but there are still plenty who haven’t, yet. We think Apple founder Steve Jobs is ripe to join the movement: the icon of cool is starting to get some bad press for his lack of generosity (something that happened to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett shortly before they made their first big gifts); he is a cancer survivor, which as well as giving him a sense of his own mortality, is also an experience that has motivated the giving of a number of other wealthy donors such as Michael Milken and Lance Armstrong; most of all, he is a born problem-solver, so would probably love it. 

An outside bet for a new tech philanthrocapitalist is Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer – yes he’s still busy with his day job and has no time for philanthropy but why not follow Warren Buffett’s example and hand a slice of his fortune to someone he trusts to give it away.

2) New giving by American billionaires will be outstripped by donors from emerging markets. 2010′s biggest donor will probably be a Chinese billionaire that none of us has yet heard of. Or maybe one of India’s super-rich, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal perhaps, will leap to the top of the giving tables. Perhaps Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim will start to do something really substantial with the $10 billion he has already pledged to give away. We’re not sure where exactly it’s coming from but something big is going to come from the emerging markets. It would be great to see a new wave of philanthrocapitalists in Africa. Sudanese mobile phone guru Mo Ibrahim is looking a bit lonely at the moment, so here’s hoping that the super-rich of Africa decide that it’s time to do their part – 2010 would be a great opportunity for South Africa’s billionaires as the eyes of the world will be on their country due to the soccer World Cup.

3) Malaria will be the cause of the year, centred on the World Cup in South Africa. The Malaria No More campaign, backed by Bill Gates and a bunch of corporate sponors including Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, has been gathering momentum in 2009 and its publicity is due to peak around the global media event of the year in the summer of 2010. With the world focused on Africa, political leaders and the continent’s super-rich will be under pressure to show that they are committed to the fight to stop this preventable disease that kills a million people a year.

4) Football may be the big sporting event of the the year but the big celebrity philanthropist of 2010 will be a golfer, as Tiger Woods redeems his reputation by spending far more time with his foundation – which is already quite impressive, but could be far bigger. His private life may be a mess but Tiger is certainly a fighter, so we expect him to come back in 2010 with some big giving to rescue his reputation.

5) On the theme of redemption, we’re expecting a bumper year of giving from the financial sector. Goldman Sachs made a good, but far too small, start in late 2009 by pledging half a billion dollars to help small businesses in America. But far more is needed if the reputation of bankers as a force for good is to have any chance of being restored. The public outcry over financiers’ pay isn’t going to go away and the bankers need to show that they’re doing their bit, corporately and personally, to take on the challenges of the economic crisis.

6) 2010 is the year when for-profit philanthropy and social investing goes to scale. 2009 saw the creation of Global Impact Investing Network, bringing together philanthropists, ethical banks and mainstream banks to push the cause of social investing. 2010 will see the flotation of Indian microfinance company SKS, a landmark in the development of ‘bottom of the pyramid’ businesses that serve the needs of the poorest and turn a profit for investors. More philanthropists are likely to focus on how to take the lessons of microfinance and apply them to supplying other services demanded by the poor. Watch this space.

7) Another major celebrity will join the list of those known as much for their commitment to giving as for what made them famous in the first place. In the book we profile Bono, Angelina Jolie, Shakira and Chinese film star Jet Li as examples of effective “celanthropists”, who are allying their celebrity with professional philanthropic support organisations in partnership with mega donors, big business and even governments. Our top tip to go big in 2010? Matt Damon, who lately has been spending a lot of time getting to grip with the details of what is going to be one of the biggest issues facing the planet in the coming decades, access to water.

Mass philanthrocapitalism will go from strength to strength. Kiva.org will get over its recent difficulties and sites like GlobalGiving will find new ways to enrich the donor experience to stimulate giving. But the big story in 2010 will be Facebook Causes as millions of people use their social networks as a force for good by, say, ‘giving’ their birthdays – celebrating another year by getting their friends to donate to charity rather than buying them a new pair of socks.

9) Philanthropy will start to take on tougher foreign policy challenges in 2010, increasingly in partnership with government. Afghanistan and Pakistan are top of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ‘to do’ list next year but have so far received little attention from philanthrocapitalists. In 2009 this started to change as the State Department hooked up with social media gurus to think about how to use the internet to take on extremism in the Middle East. Afghanistan and Pakistan are crying out for aid that actually gets kids educated, supplies villages with water, gives people jobs, empowers women – the list goes on. Here’s a cause that’s ripe for innovation from the philanthrocapitalists.

10) Getting involved in the ‘war on terror’ is going to be controversial but so will much of the best philanthropy in 2010. From Bill Gates’s efforts to reform America’s schools that are annoying the teaching unions to George Soros’s new initiatives to remake economics, philanthrocapitalists will increasingly court controversy. But if it helps create a better world, that is the sort of controversy worth having.

Happy new year!

At first, this is a stealth effort – starting with what seem to be isolated acts by wealthy individuals, such as Turner’s new campaign, “Billionaires Against Bullshit”. But on July 4th, the group goes public, as they launch their initiative to undo the negative influence of corporate money in America’s capital through a sort of “reverse Gresham’s law” in which good money drives out bad.

This story is told in the new book by veteran American activist and sometime presidential candidate, Ralph Nader. He describes “Only the Super Rich Can Save Us” not as a novel but rather, an exercise in “practical Utopianism” in the tradition of English politician and philosopher, Sir Thomas More.

This is not, as Nader’s leftwing credentials might lead you to expect, a satire. He is serious, believing that the biggest obstacle to the political change he has sought throughout his career is money, of which a group of super rich people old enough to be focused on their legacy might be the perfect source. Nader has been able to make this case in person, as he has called all his leading characters to tell them he has written fictional versions of them. Most, he says, seemed happy enough, including Buffett, who he met for breakfast in Omaha a few weeks ago.

There are many similarities between Nader’s book and ours, as Matthew discussed with him the other day on stage at New York’s 92nd Street Y. We also include our own piece of practical Utopianism in our concluding chapter, by describing the junior Bill Gates celebrating his 70th birthday on October 25th 2025 aboard Richard Branson’s luxurious eco-friendly space mansion. After Paul Hewson, the secretary general of the United Nations formerly known as Bono, sings, Gates announces the eradication of malaria from the earth.

To be honest, we believe our Utopia is far likelier to be achieved than Nader’s. But we do share a belief that the super rich and their money can be a powerful force for good – and that currently they are not making the most of that opportunity, not least because of a reluctance to get too deeply into the political process (with the notable exceptions of Soros, who likes to describe himself as a “political philanthropist”, and Michael Bloomberg, who is about to buy himself a third term as mayor of New York and still aspires to occupy the White House). As we have argued many times, changing government policy is a crucial way in which philanthrocapitalists can leverage their relatively small amounts of money, as Gates is starting to discover, although, as he is also discovering, this can be controversial.

Our strongest point of disagreement is over the role of companies. Nader believes that companies are the primary source of corruption in the political process, capturing Washington to serve their interests rather than those of the people. We actually see signs of change at the top of a growing number of leading companies as bosses realise that being a good corporate citizen is crucial to their long-term success.

Both Nader and we use Wal-Mart, the huge retailer, as the focus of our argument – and in this respect, perhaps Nader is more open to the possibility of change than his rhetoric suggests. In his book, Wal-Mart is persuaded to abandon its lifelong opposition to trade unions. In our book, we tell the true story of how Wal-Mart converted to the cause of fighting climate change.

We have many differences with Nader on the specifics of what the super rich could (and should try to) achieve. We aren’t convinced, for example, that electing Warren Beatty as governor would be the answer to California’s many problems (though, in this idea, as in the roles he gives to Yoko Ono and Bill Cosby, Nader shares our belief in the power of celanthropy). But it is striking that someone who has spent a lifetime campaigning for social change – sometimes to great effect (as in making cars safer) – has come, through hard-earned practical experience, to share our belief that super rich “hyperagents” are essential partners for activists in building a better world.

Yet this was not some sudden conversion of Bono’s brother-in-arms to the anti-aid cause. Geldof delivered a typically technicolour refutation of Dambisa Moyo’s arguments against aid and celebrated the fact that 37 million Africans had gone to school as a result of the aid commitments won at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005. He is just frustrated that poverty hasn’t been eliminated already.

Geldof is not sure if he’s a philanthropist because he doesn’t have a lot of money to give away. We think he is a classic “celanthropist” – a celebrity philanthrocapitalist – because, as he admits himself, his fame gives him “access”, which he can use to do good.

The other panelists had no such doubts about their qualifications as philanthropists. Yohei Sasakawa is chairman of the Nippon Foundation (and co-founder of Forum 2000). Czech supermodel Helena Houdova runs her Sunflower Children’s Foundation. Catherine Zennstrom, a French citizen, has recently established the Zennstrom Philanthropies with her Swedish tech billionaire husband, Niklas, the co-founder of Skype. Sigrid Rausing, also Swedish, is one of Britain’s most respected philanthropists, through the work of her trust.

Notice anything about these names? Firstly, there were no Americans – which shows how philanthrocapitalism is an increasingly global phenomenon, including in Japan, which is often described as a philanthropy-free zone. Second, the majority are women, an increasingly influential force in philanthropy, we are happy to say.

As for Geldof, our verdict is that his experience, along with that of Bono, is a deeply encouraging one. They have learned a lot, realized how naive and ineffective their earliest efforts were, yet they have stuck to their mission and driven themselves to find better ways to achieve it. Along the way, they have inspired millions of people around the world to be more altruistic and given many more the chance of a better life – which, as futility goes, isn’t bad.

Former President Bill Clinton’s foundation has negotiated with pharmaceutical companies much lower prices for anti-retroviral drugs for people with HIV/Aids in poor countries, which is one reason why we are glad he will be allowed to continue his philanthropy now his wife is to be America’s Secretary of State. President Clinton has also worked closely with another foundation that we profile in the book, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, created by Chris and Jamie Cooper-Hohn, to make available affordable anti-retrovirals for children with HIV/Aids in poor countries.

Matthew recently interviewed Peter Piot, who is stepping down after a long and impressive stint as executive director of the United Nations program to fight Aids. (The new executive director of UNAIDS will be Michel Sidibe.) Piot, who is expected to join a think-tank in London focused on global public health, said that for the first time, this year he has seen real signs of progress. Reflecting on what has been done right, he pointed to effective global leadership, and the development of a treatment in high-income countries that generated belief that something could be done in developing countries, too.

Piot praised as “fundamental” the contribution made by philanthrocapitalists to the fight against HIV/Aids. What they have brought is a combination of a willingness to fund risky “crazy ideas” that governments would not touch, and access to at-risk people in areas where it is hard for government to get – such as workplaces – and with a credibility that government struggles to muster – such as educating young people about safe sexual behaviour through MTV. There is a need to become even more professional in changing behaviour through a businesslike approach to marketing and branding, he says. The lessons for fighting other diseases? “Don’t leave it to governments. You need a coalition, a brilliant coalition, that will use the best skills of business and non-governmental organisations and community groups, as well as governments, of course, and, secondly, a strong emphasis on results and facts, which not only is good for mobilising constituencies but also gives you accountability.”

Past winners include Bono and Larry Brilliant, whose wish – “that you would help build a global system to detect each new disease or disaster as quickly as it emerges or occurs” – earned him the top job at Google.org, which is belatedly now getting its act together. (Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, reportedly made him the job offer on a TED audience comment card.)

This year, the prize has gone to Sylvia Earle, a deep sea explorer and ocean activist; Jose Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan who is attacking poverty by enabling children to play music; and Jill Cornell Tarter, who
according to the press release is “the woman leading the world’s search for extra-terrestrial life”. Whatever she wishes, may the force be with her.

In the book, we note that prizes have a long and honourable history in philanthropy and social innovation, and we argue that the recent growth in their popularity is a notable feature of philanthrocapitalism. We particularly like Mo Ibrahim’s prize for retired African leaders, which is provoking a lively debate about how to improve government in Africa.

We also admire the work of the X Prize Foundation, although we wonder if it will be able to achieve its ambitious agenda given the difficultyin some of the complex areas it plans to address of defining a prize
precisely enough for objective judges to tell if it has been won. In a recent interview, X Prize Foundation creator Peter Diamandis told Matthew about his plans, and predicted that someone somewhere will soon offer a $1 billion prize for something yet to be determined.

Audio: Bill Clinton at Clinton Global Initative

It was a particular pleasure that we were joined by one of the world’s leading business writers – Jim Collins of “Good to Great” fame – and one of the world’s great philosophers, Peter Singer. His seminal article for the New York Times Magazine in 2006 exploring the moral arguments for philanthropy is a lucid and compelling argument for generosity (not just by the super-rich), which we explore in the book when we ask “what does it take to be a good billionaire?”

One piece of philanthropy news – Jamie Drummond, who runs Bono’s organisation to argue for debt relief for poor countries and more aid, told us that they are changing their name from DATA to One. It is no surprise that an organisation led by “celanthropists” – celebrity philanthropists – is rebranding itself to remain cool.