It is difficult to express how happy I am to have rolled forward past the Nevi'im or "prophets" portion of the Bible, to wit Kings I and II and Chronicles I and II. That was some hard going. I am well into Job now and am digging it mightily. From childhood I recalled the basic story of Job, but I had no idea that most of the book is structured as a back and forth between Job and a bunch of guys challenging him and his claim to righteousness. All in all, it recalls nothing nothing so much as Plato's dialogues, which have themselves long been gathering dust on my shelves.
Many thoughts have been flowing to me. I have been over the last year and change enjoying listening to the Acquired podcast, as I have shared before here on the blog. Ben and David, the hosts of the pod, have great vigor, enthusiasm and intelligence which they bring to a wide range of business stories. Which also means they have a lot of both knowledge and insight they can bring to bear on whatever they are investigating on a given episode.
The one problematic aspect of their show is its excessive focus on the piling up of money, which culminated in my mind towards the tail end of their Taylor Swift episode (which is absolutely worth listening to, I learned a ton about the music industry and also about her, whom I now admire even if I am not fully a convert to her tunes) where they say that she has "only" $550 million, so is not really that rich. Which is just both silly and unseemly, and reminded me of nothing so much as this occasion back in 2007 when all these NYC-area "adults" got all excited over the prospect of making billions of dollars.
What I would really like to see, and I may have to spearhead it myself, is an energetic and entertaining podcast looking at the history of philanthropy. We've seen big moments in recent years. First the Gates Foundation changing philanthropy by introducing corporate culture and a metrics-driven approach to giving away money. Then the Giving Pledge and Buffett's noble call just to give his money to Gates rather than build a large foundation with his name on it. Then MacKenzie Scott's rebuke to Gates by giving away chunks of cash without preconditions to organizations she admires and, lastly, Melinda Gates's implicit stamp of approval on Scott's model with her own post-divorce giving.
These are just recent highlights. Charitable giving is a fairly stable ~2% of US GDP. Voluntary associations have bean called out as a distinctive feature of American culture since De Tocqueville travelled round two centuries ago. The rise of NGOs worldwide is a major feature of the development of civil society, for example in China in recent years. It's a big landscape. Probably somebody is already doing this, I just need to find it and make time for it.
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