The Return of Populism?
This week I’ve had three tantalizing conversations with totally unrelated people about their ingenious ideas for how to bring quality healthcare, renewable energy, and units of social impact to market at a price and via a delivery mechanism huge percentages of the world population can afford.
In two cases, these were people who have themselves made a few or more million dollars by innovating new products in their chosen fields (medicine, finance), and now they’re shifting their focus to entrepreneurial good-doing in both unrelated fields (renewable energy) and related (creating new exchanges, but this time it’s units of social value being traded for money). In the third the fellow’s motivation is partly that he wants to make a lot of money– but he wants to do it by transforming the inaccessible way healthcare is delivered in the US and in many other parts of the world. In every case these conversations were with men in their early 40s. As they get further along I will describe what they’re doing.
There are a lot of things about the relatively unfettered capitalism in the US and the resulting income gap that concern me, but I also see peoples’ desire to do something meaningful and genuinely innovative flourishing as a result of the wealth they might make or have already made in this system.
My goal is to make information about the negative and positive externalities of all products and companies tangible, so that the natural inclination of people to do good for both themselves and others can be catalyzed through the free market, rather than suppressed as it has been in the past in all too many cases. It’s deeply encouraging that these entrepreneurs are probably in the company now of thousands if not tens of thousands of other super smart, capable people, who have discovered that the capital market can be an engine for good, and they’re making it happen.