What we've been reading

This week in due diligence

In truth, more last month than this week, but this just crossed our desk. This guest post from Inside Philanthropy argues that McKenzie Scott’s unprecedented giving has provided significant momentum to its recipients. Research shows that the unrestricted grants allowed them to refine their growth strategies, strengthen their operating capacity and build out their teams. Yet, “while the Scott grant was a major boost, nonprofits emphasized how much more impact they could have if they had follow-on funding that leveraged Scott’s investment.” The authors make the case that McKenzie Scott has essentially de-risked the investments for other grantmakers, who should now follow.?

This week in positionism vs. relationism

You didn’t know this but this week’s Champions’ League Semi-Final between Real Madrid and Manchester City wasn’t just the absurd display of a billion dollar club appearing to be the underdog to a petrostate stand-in, it was also the battle of two radically opposed strategies, positionism and relationism, which we can best summarize as rigid zonal play vs. structured improvisation, as The Guardian explains. If either sounds like the corporate culture you are trying to get away from, you’ll know which team to support next time.?

This week in humans standing tall

…because humans never quite stand so tall as when they stoop to steal other human’s basic sustenance: a?company bought property in Arizona and sold water rights to another town 200 miles away.?

This week in sovereign debt

It was spring meeting time for multilateral financial institutions - a seasonal jamboree that brings DC to the brink of being actually animated. But perhaps more importantly, there is some movement in trying to address the post-pandemic debt problems of poor countries, according to The Economist . The club of lenders has broadened in recent years, with China playing a larger role. Decision making has been less homogenous: China has been loath to restructure debt when countries run out of cash, creating tension among lenders. The IMF is considering a new strategy, lending in arrear, which would come with “a promise from borrowing countries and co-operative creditors that its cash injections will not be used to pay off the holdouts.” We don’t know if this is positionism or relationism but we want to see this play out.?

This week in democratic uprising

Some people worry that the next election may make the US inhospitable. “Polls show that — at least for some groups of Americans — the desire to leave the United States has skyrocketed. During the Obama administration, for example, about 10 percent of women said they “would like to move to another country permanently,” according to Gallup. That was essentially unchanged from the George W. Bush administration, when 11 percent said they wanted to leave. But during the Trump administration, 20 percent of women expressed a desire to permanently decamp. For the poorest 20 percent of Americans, the numbers zoomed from 13 percent under Obama to 30 percent under Trump.”? But? everyone can’t afford to flee,? and businesses that help clients acquire visas and other residential rights abroad are seeing a surge in interest from “wealthy, left-leaning Americans thinking about escape hatches.” The Boston Globe Media reports.

Books we may end up reading (but not necessarily understanding)

We’re always grateful for writers who make the obtuse accessible to our lay brain. Take Spinoza. Not his writings, but this New Yorker article, about a book about what Spinoza wrote, and how he lived, something commonly known as a biography.?

In a tiny nutshell, Spinoza, a free thinker, was excommunicated from the Jewish community and shunned by the Christians, even though he was a believer - he just wasn’t into God the way others were into God in seventeenth century Amsterdam. This came with risks, prison wasn't too far, and yet he spoke, and wrote, his mind. But he protected himself, writing in latin, and “on the preface to the “Tractatus,” he declares that he is writing only for philosophers and discourages “the multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude,” from reading the book: “I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont.” But then…”Democratic ideas that were punishable by imprisonment in the sixteen-sixties became the watchwords of the American and French Revolutions a century later.”? Perhaps The modern day lesson is, if you have radical thoughts, don’t put them on the internet?

In other philosophical news, Susan Neiman has a lovely piece in the 纽约时报 about how Immanuel Kant, 300 years after his birth, is more relevant than ever, because he showed that a free, just and moral life is possible everywhere.?

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