The Vision Pioneers Blog

by Miriam Garvi

Since his speech in Davos last January, Bill Gates has been receiving accolades for launching his version of capitalism, which he has labeled «creative capital».

Creative capital à la Bill Gates (“Microsoft”) is a wonderland vision where global corporations satisfy their hunger for new markets by introducing technology to the poor, making everyone prosperous in the process. According to Gates, this will generate both profit and recognition, whilst making astonishing headway in the fight against world poverty. An improved variant of corporate social responsibility that we simply cannot do without.

And since the speech, creative capital has been center-stage.

But beyond the shimmering rhetoric, however, what does his suggestion really mean? Are we to understand that for the first time in history, the profit maximizing agendas of global corporations find themselves in harmony with the needs of the poorest of the poor? That products and services will now be created that can really help people out of their miseries?

Inspired by professor C.K. Prahalad’s fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, Gate’s version of creative capital envisions to reach untapped markets with technological salvation, making the rest of the world dependent on the know-how of those controlling the innovation.

This is not an eradication of poverty through profits, but a strategy for creating the capacity to consume where there would appear to be none. It would seem that our global society welcomes the poor as consumers, as long as they are not empowered.

by Miriam Garvi

For the inquisitive soul who seeks to understand what leads people to make fatal choices, Swedish writer and historian Bengt Liljegren’s recent biography comes as a most welcome surprise.

Wondering what another book might add to the by now extensive list of Hitler biographies, I needed to read no further than the prologue for my interest to be awakened:

«My interest was triggered during the summer holidays in 1974. I had just finished sixth grade and rode my bicycle down to Gleerup’s bookstore in Lund and invested … in Mark-Arnold Forster’s The World at War 1939-1945. The book made a deep impression on me. I was even more taken by the British television series The World at War… (…). Adolf Hitler obviously played a big role in the book and the series, yet he remained strangely diffuse, it was as if there were no real person behind the figure of terror who started WWII and murdered Jews. As a thirteen year old I was given the impression that Hitler was a monster - not a human being. (…) I hope to make Hitler more understandable, to generate a truer image of his personality and private life as the background for his evil deeds… It is about time Adolf Hitler is undemonized. Knowledge about him as a person is an effective vaccine against his sick ideology.» (Liljegren 2008, pp. 8-11; own translation).

Bengt Liljegren (2008) Adolf Hitler, Historiska Media.

However comforting it may be to look back on people as monsters or idols, we need the human stories that make us reflect on the consequences of what may at first seem to be harmless actions and choices. The uncanny truth is that anyone can become a Hitler at heart, but not everyone is endowed with his kind of charisma and brilliance that will charm a nation.

Only by seeing people as the you and mes that we really are can we truly learn from history.