If I had to pick the one person on the planet who I admire most at the moment, it would probably be George Soros. I was reminded of this when he recently poked his head up and said some intelligent things on Rocketboom - major kudos to Amanda for scoring an interview with one of the planet’s major players. One very appropriate question given her audience - how does he use the net? I was interested to discover that he uses it “through other people” - a pity, I think it’s better to get your feed unfiltered. I guess it all depends on whether your people are paid to give you the truth, or shield you from having to know the truth. [1]
Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help - like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.
I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.
“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” - George Soros
He thinks very hard about some monstrously complicated issues, and he tries to share the benefit of his wisdom - not only through supporting changemakers in their own countries through his foundations, but also through writing books. I have to admit that I’ve been so busy in the time since I discovered that he was more than an ordinary billionaire that I haven’t had time to read any of his books, but they’re definitely on my amazon wishlist.
I’ll probably write more about Soros later. I really am a bit of a fan. He’s got some great stuff to say about the “war on terror” at the moment, so if you, like me, don’t have time to read the book, then at least catch some of the interviews linked from his homepage.
[1] On the matter of people who get their facts through other people, who thinks Ken Lay was as badly misinformed by his people as GWB usually is? Personally I think that like Bush, he was well aware that the information he got was being pre-laundered and pre-spun, but that was the way he liked it.
[I'm turning off comments for this post because it seems to be the one that gets the most spam comments for some reason.]
