World wealth…and a game to hold on to it

Here is the link to Capgemini’s recently released World Wealth Report. Some factoids (and my additions in [ ]: 10.1 million people around the world have financial assets of more than 1 million USD [compare to proportions of people living on less than one dollar per day - 2.6 billion people live on less than [...]

World wealth…and a game to hold on to it

Here is the link to Capgemini’s recently released World Wealth Report. Some factoids (and my additions in [ ]: 10.1 million people around the world have financial assets of more than 1 million USD [compare to proportions of people living on less than one dollar per day - 2.6 billion people live on less than [...]

Transfer WHAT wealth?

Eight Reasons You Should not Expect an Inheritance (New York Times, June 21, 2008) For a LONG time now I’ve been raising questions about the impact that health care costs, retirement (or the lack there of), and living transfers of wealth will have on the much-touted Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth numbers. These predictions of trillion [...]

Recessions, the wealthy and philanthropy

Given the chaos on Wall Street these past weeks, a report on the declining rate of growth in American millionaires may not come as any surprise. But since philanthropy is ever-occupied with transfers of wealth and such, I thought it appropriate to bring to your attention this report from the Spectrem Group: “The number of [...]

Recessions, the wealthy and philanthropy

Given the chaos on Wall Street these past weeks, a report on the declining rate of growth in American millionaires may not come as any surprise. But since philanthropy is ever-occupied with transfers of wealth and such, I thought it appropriate to bring to your attention this report from the Spectrem Group: “The number of [...]

YouTube, Blog, SecondLife Davos

If you don’t want to spend the carbon credits to get to Davos (never mind the money) you can catch a good bit of the World Economic Forum at: The Davos blogs The Blog Aggregator On GoogleVideo On YouTube On the wiki Via Webcasts and podcasts And in SecondLife There are plenty of chances to [...]

Broadband gentrification

The following quote is from Steven Johnson’s blog, citing discussions he had with friends who had just been mugged and were considering leaving Brooklyn. He notes in his post that, while these are seemingly close friends of his, he learned about the mugging via outside.in, one of the “hyperlocal” blogs I noted earlier (and the [...]

On the value of human lives, goals, and excuses

Peter Singer, a notably challenging philosopher (he has been described as the world’s most “controversial ethicist”), takes on the question of the value of a human life in assessing the philanthropy of the world’s wealthiest individuals. The article is in the upcoming NY Times Sunday Magazine (subscription required) The article shows several things. First, that [...]

Worldwide wealth…and lack thereof

Philanthropists don’t like to talk about this issue and certainly we don’t seem to be doing much about it. Looking at the enormous gaps in wealth around the world, however, seems to me to be a starting point from which to think about the role of philanthropy in our societies. Great philanthropy, has, after all, [...]