February Business Before Business Breakfast
Speaker: Dr. Stanley N. Katz
Professor of Public & International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Topic: Can we save the world through philanthropy?
“Are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos good for democracy?” – Stanley N. Katz
Join us to learn about the ways in which the enormous explosion of personal wealth in the US has created a new plutocracy in which a small number of Americans (the one-tenth of the upper one percent of the population of the US) now possess the majority of wealth in the country. Given our extraordinarily permissive law of charity, we have created a system in which the national government subsidizes (through tax deductions) the “charitable” giving of the wealthy. At the same time, our political system is now configured in ways that privilege the wealthy, and give them political power out of proportion to their numbers. Add to this the possibility of creating mega-foundations (private philanthropic foundations with more than one billion dollars in net assets) which are increasing used to influence public policy in areas such as K-12 education, health and welfare. In this talk, Dr. Katz will address: Is this really the way a democracy should govern itself? If the answer to this question is, as he thinks, “no,” what more democratic alternatives are available.
Stanley Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education in the United States. Mr. Katz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1955 with a major in English History and Literature. He received his M.A. from Harvard in American History in 1959 and his Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1961. He attended Harvard Law School in 1969-70.
Dr. Katz is director of Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.