Guest Author - Guido Deboeck

So the market is going down, you are out and you wonder what books to read while you wait for the market to turn around? Just about at week ago a book came out under the title Giving: How each of us can change the world. The author on the cover: Bill Clinton.

The book description starts off by telling us that Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.

And the description continues to emphasize that "Bill Clinton shares his own experiences" and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving.

Question is how much of this is new? Did anyone not know about Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation, Warren Buffet, Agassi, Ophrah etc? Are those really the "great examples" of givers? So many people in this country have helped others, here or abroad, from early age on, offered their skills, time or part of their income to contribute to the poor, before they accumulated any wealth. It is not the stars of the media that are the biggest contributors, it is all the other "givers" that together have had more impact over many more years that should have been highlighted. After all if you first have to accumulate a few billions (or millions) before you start consider "giving", there is something fundamentally wrong with your understanding of the world we are living in.

Actually, Bill Clinton's book is one that anyone with a small research staff and a couple of excellent editors could have written. The content is a long laundry list of people, organizations and government programs that have been "giving" money, time, and/or skills; all of this data could easily have been assembled by some research assistants or even by any of you who know how productive one can become with Google. Granted it is all put together in an easy readable format but that does not leave out the possibility that a couple of excellent editors produced the bulk of it.

In between this jungle of often unrelated data -- e.g. Benjamin Franklin's organization of firefighting -- are the personal notes of Bill Clinton e.g. how his wife was much more geared to helping the poor while she was in college than he was; how Al Gore gave Bill weekly (for eight years) a lecture about the environment, the fight on climate control (and now he finally got it?), etc.

The biggest problem with Clinton's assertions especially about all "the millions of people that have been affected when he was in office", is that he confuses cause and effect! Just because some things happen on "a certain watch", it does not imply that they were necessary the effect of deliberate programs. In the literatue one distinguishes between program outputs, effects and impact; Bill Clinton should know this, since it was USAIDs who came up with “the logical framework” in the 70's.

In the chapter about Government's contributions in "Giving" there is no mention how poverty evolved during the eight years that Bill was in the office; nor are there any references to contributions made by international organizations such as the World Bank, W.H.O., UNICEF; nor does Bill write about the current administrations contributions to HIV/AIDS relative to his own foundations. Dr Paul Farmer's work in the field on this came long before Bill Clinton "discovered" it after an almost fatal heart attack .

Throwing big numbers around with little supporting evidence, mixed with a political agenda for promoting his wife-- in this book you can read what the big five policy challenges are for the next President of the US (p 187) -- turn this in a rather boring book that after a few pages you wish you can quickly resell, get your money back and spend it on what your heart tells you about giving rather than what Bill Clinton suggests, who clearly is a latecomer in "giving".