Link Banana

This David Brooks column, like his recent one of Rank-Link Imbalance, seems a tad to generic for it’s own good. But I liked this bit:

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

It strikes me as a good counterargument to Thomas Friedman’s slightly silly concerns in “Generation Q”, which I took issue with at the time.

David Leonhardt’s piece in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine is a good one, even if he doesn’t really answer that question. Consider this:

In the late 1980s, an economist named James Andreoni argued that the internal motives for giving were indeed more important than many people had acknowledged. He came up with a name for his idea — the “warm glow” theory — and it stuck. In the warm-glow view of philanthropy, people aren’t giving money merely to save the whales; they’re also giving money to feel the glow that comes with being the kind of person who’s helping to save the whales.