The following segment is an excerpt and preview of a conversation that took place between myself and Peter Buffett: composer, chairman of the NOVO Foundation, and son of investor Warren Buffett. Peter’s op-ed last year in the New York Times on the “charitable industrial complex”—retweeted over 8000 times and liked and shared by over a hundred thousand people on Facebook—was not only a stunning and unexpected indictment of the philanthropic status quo, but a bold call to imagine a new economy. This latter aspect—Peter’s demand for, as he put it, “concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market”—led to the conversation excerpted here, when I sat down with Peter at the close of 2013 for a discussion of systemic crisis and the possibility of hope. The full conversation will appear soon.
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