Friday, March 21, 2008

Social Networks and Public Issues

David Brooks, the conservative columnist at the New York Times, offers a vision of netrworks of government facilitated social entrepreneurs setting to work on intractable social issues including poverty and college access.

In "Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders" he paints a vision of data-driven, nerdy, Bill Gates lookalikes attacking problems government agencies cannot solve.

This is the image of the public-private partnership in the so-called social sector that Peter Drucker promoted and Al Gore labeled "re-inventing government".

Every progressive voice for change simply has to come to terms with this image: supporting it and contributing to it, or critiquing or de-bunking it. It is the new trend in public thought. It is not going away any time soon. Look for some version of this from both national political parties.

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