The first 'golden age' was the 19th century, the time of Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller Sr., McGoey reminds us. According to her, "From Carnegie’s spending on public libraries to Rockefeller’s investment in biomedical advances, their giving helped to shift charity from the dispensing of alms in a largely unsystematic manner to a business in itself, overseen by paid philanthropic advisors".
One trend in the ‘second golden age’ that is significant, she suggests, is 'philanthrocapitalism'. This she summarizes as "a more muscular philanthropy that seeks to combine profits with poverty alleviation". She is not entirely accurate. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, who coined the term, described the concept succinctly as "philanthropy led by the world's wealth creators... applying business techniques and ways of thinking to their philanthropy".
Paul Schervish, cited several times by Bishop and Green, is the scholar who has, more than any other, studied the philanthropy of US wealth creators. He described one of the characteristics wealthy philanthropists' as 'hyperagency'. Hyperagency means “… being able to construct a self in a world that transcends the established institutional limits and, in fact creates the limits for others”.
Schervish also points out that these hyperagents are the 'producers' of philanthropy in a market where the currency is not money but emotions, and the producers are not troubled by competition.
Another trend in the second golden age, according to McGoey is the effective altruism movement, championed by Peter Singer. Singer has declared Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates “the most effective altruists in history.”
McGoey's concern is that the hype around the second golden age is ignoring questions about its effectiveness. "Its progress," she says "often seems to be measured and underpinned by self-sustaining feedback loops". Giving in the US has remained stubbornly around 2% of GDP.
Foundations are a growth industry in the US yet extreme poverty , meanwhile, continues to rise.
"Today’s philanthrocapitalists see a world full of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put right," Bishop and Green wrote.
Another commentator, Michael Edwards, sets that notion to rights in 'Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World', his rebuttal of Bishop and Green’s book. Edwards believes that “business thinking and social transformation operate on entirely different logics”.
Finally, McGoey points to an alarming paradox from the first golden age which, hopefully, is not destined to be emulated in the second. She quotes from David Nasaw, Carnegie’s biographer, “Carnegie … became, if anything, more ruthless in pursuit of profits once he had determined that those profits would be distributed during his lifetime.” Then she juxtaposes this tweet from Martin Shkreli, “I donated a total of $5,000,000 to various causes recently. Looking forward to telling you all about it.” Shkreli is the former hedge fund trader, who was vilified for raising the price of Daraprim - a drug that fights parasitic infections in AIDS and other immune-supressed patients - by 5,000%
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