Today Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke launched their website/ social experiment "Creative Capitalism: A Conversation." The cyberspace location will serve as the sounding board for a forthcoming book -- to be published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008 -- which riffs on Bill Gates' January speech on the limits of philanthropy at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The speech, titled "A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century," touted the idea of harnessing the power of free market capitalism and economic self-interest to better the lives of the world's poor. Many great economic minds have signed on as contributors.

Consider all the lost potential of Third World children that never make it to adolescence, thus never bettering the world with their contributions. Leo Strauss, that profoundly misunderstood political thinker, used to say something to the effect of the fact that he was not philosophizing, , per se, but merely preparing the ground for the Burmese philosophical genius of the future who will take up where Aristotle left off. It is an interesting idea. What if that genius of a world-historical calibre dies of cholera in South America, unheralded and unsung? What if the next Stephen Hawking or the next Marie Curie or the next Miles Davis is presently dying in Darfur from the drought?

Can the profit-motive of the free market somehow be harnessed to help the world's poor? It is certainly an experiment worth talking about. And so let the conversation begin here.

[Image: Harvard Business School]