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Lessons of the New Gilded Age

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Never question the rich. They are better than you. Because they are rich. So if you question anything about them, including why they are allowed to make enormous decisions around social problems that have nothing to do with their core industries solely because they are rich, you are the problem comrade and you need to be dealt with appropriately.

 Geoffrey Lamb is the foundation’s chief economic and policy adviser. His response to the attack by William Easterly, in The Tyranny of Experts, on Gates’s “technocratic illusion” suggests that neither Gates nor the senior staff at the foundation take such criticism seriously. In a breezy dismissal of Easterly published on the foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog in 2014, Lamb referred to the US Agency for International Development’s “support for democratic movements” as an undeniable fact—one that obviated any need on his part to address a core element in Easterly’s argument, which was that supporting democratic movements was precisely what USAID was not doing in Ethiopia.

Lamb’s blithe confusion speaks to the confidence of the new status quo. Garry W. Jenkins, a professor of law at Ohio State University, has written: “With its emphasis on superrich hyperagents solving social problems, philanthrocapitalism” has amplified “the voice of those who already wield substantial influence, access, and power.” What this means is that, for the first time in modern history, it has become the conventional wisdom that private business—the most politically influential, undertaxed, and underregulated sector among those groups that dispose of real power and wealth in the world, as well as the least democratically accountable—should be entrusted with the welfare and fate of the powerless and the hungry. No revolution, not even Fidel’s, could be more radical, and no expectation, no matter how much it was the product of ceaseless promotion in both old and new media, could be more counterintuitive, more antihistorical, or require a greater leap of faith.

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