By Christian Meyer zu Natrup
The historian Rutger Bregman opens his book Moral Ambition with a line that has stayed with me: “the greatest waste of our times is the waste of talent.” His argument is simple and uncomfortable. Around a quarter of people in wealthy countries believe their jobs are meaningless, while the hardest problems facing humanity go under-staffed and under-solved. Bregman’s answer is not modest do-gooding but moral ambition: the drive to be among the best, measured not by title, salary or status, but by how much of the world’s suffering you actually help to end.
What I admire in the book is that it rehabilitates ambition rather than apologising for it. Good intentions are not enough. Bregman is as impatient with the purity and posturing of some activism as he is with the quiet waste of a brilliant mind spent optimising advertising clicks. He wants idealism married to rigour, and results that can be measured.
There is one thing he underplays. Bregman leans heavily on the nonprofit as the vehicle for moral ambition, as though purpose sat on one side of a line and money on the other. The real work is in the interplay between the two. Not NGOs or capital, not mission or markets, but both, deliberately combined. The morally ambitious task of this decade is not to pick a side. It is to make finance and civil society pull on the same rope, so that private money reaches the people and places it usually ignores, and NGOs gain a second source of income and discipline. Neither reaches at scale what the two reach together.
This is also the heart of the wellbeing economy thinking that has gained ground in recent years. The economy is not a law of nature. It is a human design, a set of rules and incentives we wrote and can rewrite, and for two centuries we have tuned it to maximise output rather than to serve the people living inside it. Redesigning it around dignity, fairness and the health of the planet is not utopian. It is overdue.
Put those ideas together and you have, more or less, why we do what we do. We ask talented people and serious organisations to aim higher, at the hardest problems, and to get there effectively rather than only earnestly. And we place ourselves deliberately in the space between civil society and capital, bending money, grant, concessional and commercial alike, toward human and ecological wellbeing. One firm carries the purpose, the other the finance, and the point is that they are a single effort.
None of this is easy. A cooperative, social market, one in which public purpose, private capital and civil society work with one another rather than past one another, is hard to build and harder to sustain. Both the incentives and the instincts on either side resist it. But I have come to believe it is the best tool we have to save this planet and the people on it. Unchecked markets will not do it. Grants alone can no longer reach far enough. The two, working as one, still can.
This is not charity dressed up in the language of markets. It is the belief that a rehabilitation centre reopened, a refugee family earning again, a child in a functioning classroom, are the real returns, and that measuring them truthfully is a moral duty, not a marketing exercise.
So here is the question I keep putting to myself, and to the people we work with. Talent and capital are the two great resources we have, and both are being wasted at scale. What would it take, this year, to waste a little less of each?
