Creative Capitalism

Bill gates gave a speech at the davos wolrd Economic Forum on Thursday about "creative capitalism". Gates has been talking for a while about the shortcomings of the modern capitalist system; he's one of the few business leaders not in thrall to the free markets at all costs mantra. Gates was speaking about an issue that is generally subsumed under the rubric of "corporate social responsibility" and although he makes it clear that he iis not talking about that, it's unfortunate that the post hoc journalism about the event will push the issue into that particular known and readily-digestible topic area.
There is no question that what Gates is leading is transformational in the sense that nobody has ever operated with such a huge finacial platform to transform the possibilities for the world in such a self-aware fashion. From what I've seen, the Gates Foundation is attracting the best and brightest and enabling them to develop program structures and tools for capturing the core requirements for building a sustainable future -- the proverbial "world that works for everyone." They are developing metrics and dashboards that respond to the genuine issues that exist, and although their efforts are deeply embedded inside first world assumptions, it is clear also that they are on the ground in the developing world and feeding that reality back in ways that a representative sampling process is in place. It's all worthy from my perspective.
Yet Gates seems constrained in his still-current role as the Chairman of a modern US corporation to see that corporate activity and activism is likely not the medium of solving the world's problems. likewise, when he points to governments as being the primary sources of aid, he still misses the point. He still hasn't crossed over -- or transformed -- into seeing the outline of real solutions for the human predicament -- what I consider to be the eemergence of a global polity. A global polity is one in which the pre-eminent context for a human being is service and contribution. Gates points to this when he quotes Adam Smith and recognizes the fundamental human drive to be "interested in the fortunes of others." In the early part of the 21st Century, we've been "game theory-ed" out of this belief.
This discussion of how best to coordinate and integrate the existing set of actors -- corporations, governments, NGOs -- is certainly worthy and no-trivial. Yet at some point there needs to be the recognition that, as Einstein said, "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them." The new level of thinking recognizes different starting assumptions about the capacity of the physical universe to provide.