THE CARING COMPANY: HOW TO SHIFT BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY FOR GOOD
Isaac Getz and Laurent Marbacher
(Wiley, 2025)

 

How many are in love with humankind and not with man.

—René Char 1

Without doubt, business philanthropy has helped alleviate numerous problems that would otherwise have remained unaddressed. It has also been subjected to many criticisms. The most traditional of them is exemplified by the critique of the nineteenth-century robber barons’ philanthropy. Thus, Andrew Carnegie would harshly suppress worker unrest, remaining deaf to their demands, but later on contributed lavishly to the network of municipal libraries throughout America.

However, the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) formulated an entirely different criticism. His mid-nineteenth century short story “Lucerne” revolves around an event described in the following way by Prince Nekhliudof, its main character and narrator:

On the 19th of July, 1857, before the Schweitzerhof Hotel, in which very opulent people were lodging, a wandering beggar minstrel sang for half an hour his songs, and played his guitar. About a hundred people listened to him. The minstrel thrice asked you all to give him something. Not one person gave him a thing, and many made sport of him.2

The story goes on to recount how the protagonist manages to find the poor musician and spends an evening with him. However, it concludes with the narrator’s thoughts on the deeper significance of the event, which seems to him like “something entirely novel and strange, not connected with the everlastingly ugly side of human nature, but rather with … progress and civilization.” He then poses the question:

Why is it that this inhuman fact … is … possible [in Lucerne] where civilization, freedom, and equality are carried to the highest degree of development, where there are gathered together the most civilized travelers from the most civilized nations? Why is it that these cultivated human beings, generally capable of every honorable human action, had no hearty, human feeling for one good deed? Why is it that these people who in their palaces, their meetings, and their societies, labor warmly [about] India, about the spread of Christianity and culture in Africa, about the formation of societies for attaining all perfection – why is it that they should not find in their souls the simple, primitive feeling of human sympathy?

And he concludes with this question:

Has the spreading of that reasonable, egotistical association of people, which we call civilization, destroyed and rendered nugatory the desire for instinctive and loving association?3

Tolstoy seems to have identified an evolution that began when Europe’s wealthy citizens became increasingly concerned with “progress and civilization.” To advance these ideals, many engaged with grand, remote causes like those he cites in Asia or Africa. Yet, these same individuals, when directly encountering a poor gifted musician, not only failed to offer a token of help but even mocked him. In other words, Tolstoy is puzzled and condemns these wealthy individuals contributing—often lavishly—to distant and grand causes while failing to contribute—even minimally—to the local and immediate one.

The question of whether Tolstoy is right or wrong in his critique leads us to discuss not only the effectiveness of philanthropy, but also the importance of business leaders’ direct involvement in the social innovation in their own companies.

Can Philanthropy Be Effective?

There is a long history of entrepreneurs—from nineteenth century industrialists to modern tech billionaires—who have sought to give back to society in various ways. Such giving back has also been criticized for following the whims of the givers, sometimes flattering their ego or social status, instead of solving serious challenges. In the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill elaborated a philosophy of utilitarianism, which was supposed to help guide better giving. It assumes that an action is better if it maximizes net benefits—happiness minus pain—for the greatest number. Lately promoted by thinkers like Peter Singer and called “effective altruism,” it emphasizes high-impact giving, urging donors to direct their resources to where they will lead to the highest estimated net benefits for the greatest numbers. Among the champions of this data-driven philanthropic movement are prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, such as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who would later commit the largest corporate fraud in US history.4

You may believe that entrepreneurs have finally found a method to do good effectively. However, the empirical research casts a shadow on such a belief.

In fact, the real-world philanthropic behavior of most people rarely adheres to utilitarian standards, even if they have all the data. Studies in evolutionary psychology confirm effective altruism’s claim that people are largely unaware of which donations have the greatest impact. But there is more. The vast majority of people don’t seek information on the effectiveness of charities and often favor less-effective causes over more impactful ones, even when data on effectiveness are available. And they behave like that not because they are irrational or don’t care, but because evolution has shaped philanthropic behavior in specific ways.

Though many philanthropists say that they contribute in order to benefit others—and to as many others as possible—the research in evolutionary psychology paints a different picture of philanthropists’ motives. Two Dutch researchers, Jaeger and Van Vugt, summarize these findings:

People are generally unaware of where their donations would have the largest impact. They do not search for information on charities’ impact and often prefer less effective over more effective charities. In general, donation decisions are surprisingly unaffected by charities’ effectiveness even when this information is explicitly provided.5

The last finding is particularly damaging to utilitarianism and its latest incarnation as effective altruism, which holds that if only philanthropists knew which charities provide the greatest net benefit, they would prefer them.

In fact, research rather shows that a person prefers to donate to the local charity buying dogs for blind people at the cost of $40,000 each, rather than to a global charity that can, for the same amount of money, buy anti-malaria nets to save a thousand lives in Africa. Similar findings show that people prefer to help one identified individual rather than many anonymous ones.6

Evolutionary psychology explains nonutilitarian behaviors as the product of natural selection. Jaeger and Van Vugt list three evolutionary reasons why people don’t behave as utilitarians.

The first reason is called parochialism, from the Greek paroikia meaning neighborhood. For more than three million years, humans lived in small groups and developed empathy for the members of their own group, as opposed to those outside of it. That is why donating to distant causes evokes less empathy and is felt as less obligatory to us than donating locally and to charities to which we are personally connected. One study has shown that people will donate more if it saves five persons rather than one, but only if they are family members.7 Yet, people will not donate more in order to save more strangers.

The second reason evolution provides for nonutilitarian philanthropic behavior is reputation and status. Through evolution, the group members enjoying the highest reputation and status would also enjoy such benefits as privileged access to desirable mates. Today, research shows altruists are preferred as social and romantic partners and selected as leaders.8 Surprisingly, the research also shows that one’s philanthropic reputation is not related to how beneficial their contributions were for the recipient, but only to how costly they were for the philanthropist. Moreover, a reputation for generous philanthropy will persist even if the donations have not produced any benefit at all. Furthermore, the cost-benefit-based decision-making advocated by utilitarianism is not praised socially. Worse, such utilitarian philanthropists are rated as less moral individuals and less desirable partners. People view emotions such as empathy, rather than cost-benefit reasoning, as proof of altruistic intentions.

The final reason for nonutilitarian philanthropic behavior is conformity. For the benefit of evolution, conformity is not negative. On the contrary, it provides evolutionary benefits since following others in deciding what to eat, what tool to use, or where to live increases one’s survival prospects. In philanthropy, people tend to give to charities to which others are giving—even if this charity is ineffective.

Only a small proportion of individuals—such as the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs mentioned earlier—use cost-benefit utilitarian reasoning in philanthropic behavior.9 The vast majority of philanthropists give for motives rooted in human evolution: parochialism, reputation, and conformity.

Even though people are not behaving in utilitarian ways, you might still conclude that such behavior might be good for their group survival but ineffective for humankind. The following evidence describing the basis for the research on evolution may alter your conclusion.

Our Caring Ancestors

Archaeological and anthropological evidence strongly suggests that care is not a moral afterthought but one of the foundations of human survival. Long before the emergence of complex institutions or explicit moral codes, early human groups cared for the old, the sick, the disabled, and even the dead—behaviors that make little sense from a purely self-interested or utilitarian perspective. Such acts of care did not yield direct material returns, yet they generated powerful social benefits: trust, reputation, mutual obligation, and inclusion in collective activities essential to survival. Groups in which caring became a shared norm proved more resilient than those governed primarily by force or opportunism.

This evidence also challenges the popular caricature of evolution as a story of ruthless competition: care and compassion appear earlier and more widely in the archaeological record than interpersonal violence. At the same time, this care was not boundless. As anthropological and neurophysiological research—most notably Robin Dunbar’s—shows, caring communities are naturally limited in size, because care depends on face-to-face, reciprocal relationships.10 For humans, this limit reaches roughly 150 individuals—limit known as Dunbar’s number—far more than for other primates, yet still finite—reminding us that care is both deeply rooted in our nature and constrained by the conditions under which it can genuinely be sustained.

To Care Despite Everything

The above evidence strongly suggests that caring for members of our close community is innate. Yet, as British evolutionary scholar Penny Spikins pointed out, we often struggle to recognize these findings:

Evidence for care is found both earlier in our evolutionary past than evidence for interpersonal violence and is more widespread. However, such evidence receives remarkably little acknowledgement or attention … Why this should be so is difficult to understand—we might think we should be proud of a willingness to help others. The only explanation seems to be that care and compassion feel like a weakness. In our modern cultures the deep-seated concept that success, and by implication evolutionary success, lies with selfish competition makes both the vulnerability of our ancestors, and their willingness to care for others, a strangely disturbing concept, one which is challenging to who we think we are.11

He thus attributes this difficulty to modern cultures, which equate care with weakness and promote instead competition and dominance. We believe this inability to acknowledge care as innate stems from an even darker interpretation of the human condition—one that sees humanity through the lens of a “war of every man against every man.”

This vision, coined by Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), persists because it resonates deeply with the foundational texts of modern culture—from the biblical story of Cain’s murder of Abel, to Tacitus’ and Flavius Josephus’ accounts of Roman history as a sequence of civil and imperial wars, and to the tragedies written in ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, it was the Roman playwright Plautus who first coined the phrase: Homo homine lupus (man is a wolf to man).12

Hobbes’ bleak view of human nature also persists because of the apparent omnipresence of violence throughout history—from the medieval wars of Europe and the British Civil War of Hobbes’ own time, to the two World Wars and our current era, marked by terrorism and ongoing conflicts. We say “apparent” intentionally: though violence has been tragically real, most people throughout history lived in relative peace. The perception of constant violence stems from what psychological research identifies as cognitive biases, such as the “availability heuristic.” For instance, because airplane crashes are extensively reported in the media, people often overestimate the dangers of flying and underestimate the far deadlier—but underreported—risks of driving. Like airplane crashes, wars, terrorism, and acts of violence are highly visible in writings and the media and thus perceived as pervasive, even when they are not. As is often said, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that trains arrive on time.

Hobbes’ grim assessment also dovetails with the modern economic view of human nature—one that prizes self-interest and ruthless competition, encapsulated in phrases like “zero-sum game” or “winner takes all.”

Finally, his vision also reflects the popular image of contemporary society as a maze of self-absorbed individuals competing endlessly in the pursuit of consumption and status.

Within these cultural, historical, economic, and social frameworks, care and empathy may appear out of place—something Tolstoy already observed in the mid-nineteenth century. But before accepting this bleak vision as truth and dismissing the idea that care and empathy are innate, we invite you to reflect on the extreme conditions in which cruelty, tragedy, war, exploitation, and the fight for daily survival were pushed to their absolute limits: the Nazi tyranny and the concentration camps.

For personal reasons linked to his family’s history, one of us—Isaac—developed a deep interest in this period, conducting extensive research and listening to numerous camps’ survivors. Among the many insights he gathered, two stand out.

First, when survivors spoke of the most horrific atrocities they endured, they often did so in a detached or neutral tone. Their typical comment was not directed at their tormentors but at themselves: “Humans have the capacity to adapt to anything.” Listeners are frequently struck by the emotional restraint survivors display when recounting the deaths of children, the elderly, or the sick—whether in cattle cars or on the path to gas chambers.

But there was one type of memory that consistently provoked their strong emotion: recollections of someone showing them care and empathy. One such account comes from Isaac’s conversation with Hermann Spiegel, who was an 11-year-old boy living in a Central-European region of Carpathian Ruthenia when WWII broke. He changed his name to Haim Sheffi when he came to Israel after the war.13

Sheffi fled his native town to Budapest. But in March 1944, Nazi Germany invaded Hungary, and he was deported—with nearly half a million Hungarian Jews—to Auschwitz.14 There, he survived three times the infamous “selection” process personally conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele. Later, in mid-January 1945, with the Russian army approaching Auschwitz in Poland, the SS forced the remaining prisoners onto a brutal death march toward the camps in Germany. Sheffi ended up in Dachau—the very camp where Isaac’s grandfather had also been imprisoned and killed.

Like all inmates, Sheffi was subjected to brutal forced labor, surviving on little more than a daily slice of bread. One day, as Sheffi clutched his meager ration of 150 grams, a fellow inmate—a Russian prisoner of war—snatched it away. Already weakened, Sheffi knew that losing his bread could mean death.

Devastated, he left the barracks, sat down outside, and wept. After some time, a “Dutch Jew” approached and asked why he was crying. Then, the man reached into his pocket, handed Sheffi his own bread, and said, “Take it. I don’t need it anymore.” Moments later, the man collapsed and died. “Alone, you’re doomed,” Sheffi said reflecting on his survival.

Until this moment in our conversation, Sheffi had recounted the most horrific atrocities he had endured or witnessed—always with a calm, if slightly sorrowful, demeanor. But now, as he recalled this singular act of compassion, tears streamed down his face.

As we would later read, whenever Sheffi retold this story—this moment when another human being had shown him empathy and affirmed his existence—he could never hold back his tears.

It can be argued that survivors’ testimonies are inherently biased—after all, they survived partly because they encountered individuals who showed care and empathy. Conversely, those who never did, perished. Yet such caring individuals were far from rare.

Take France, for example. When it was invaded by Germany, its Jewish population numbered close to 330,000. Despite the roundups, arrests, and deportations, about 260,000—79%—survived. French policemen warned buildings that sheltered Jews of impending raids; foster families and religious institutions hid children; both rural and urban residents provided food and shelter to those fleeing; smugglers helped Jews cross borders—from the occupied to the free zone, or across into Spain, Switzerland, or Italy. By 2023, Yad Vashem museum had recognized 4,255 individuals from France as Righteous Among the Nations—those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. One such savior was the Capuchin Franciscan friar Marie-Benoît, who played a pivotal role in smuggling nearly 4,000 Jews to safety from southern France.

You might think that it wasn’t an innate capacity for care and empathy that drove these individuals, but rather the moral values—religious or secular—instilled through their upbringing. This argument is further strengthened when we consider that most of the Jews they helped were not part of their local community, on which innate care typically focuses.

Psychological research offers deeper insight into the motivations behind such acts. According to leading scholars of human motivation, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, caring for others—and being cared for—is one of three innate psychological needs that all humans strive to fulfill.15 Yet beyond this universal need, the saviors possessed distinct personal traits that set them apart: high empathy (the ability to empathize beyond one’s immediate community), nonconformism (the capacity to resist social or authoritarian pressure), and a greater tolerance for risk, in contrast to the majority, who tend to be risk-averse. Furthermore, although they had been exposed to the same moral education as their peers, they possessed an ability to internalize these values more deeply—to the point of feeling morally compelled to uphold them, even at the cost of their own lives.

Another way to approach the innate versus acquired debate stems from the contemporary definition of innateness. According to the American cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, innate behaviors are not strictly hardwired but rather prewired and develop through the unique experiences of each individual.16 Thus, humans are prewired to care for their kin, and in particular, their children. However, their upbringing—whether through education that promotes “love thy neighbor” or through Kant’s imperative that every moral principle, including care, be applied universally—may extend this innate need to care to a broader population. Conversely, certain forms of upbringing may suppress or even eradicate this prewired need to care. The German filmmaker Michael Haneke explored this idea in his Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or-winning film The White Ribbon. He depicted how the atmosphere of early twentieth-century rural Prussia—marked by humiliation, violence, and blind obedience—shaped the minds of children who would later become the very generation of adults in Nazi Germany.

Thus, the innate need to care for those close to us, reinforced by moral education and specific individual traits, helps explain why some individuals cared for persecuted Jews when faced with their suffering—despite the danger. At the same time, the innate need to be cared for helps explain why those rescued engraved these rare acts of care—rather than the abuse they endured—into their emotional memory. Trauma specialists often remind us that trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by the disconnection from the self and the suppression of emotion that emerge as mechanisms of sheer survival. In this light, acts of care can be seen as signals—powerful affirmations to the self—that reassert its presence and vitality, even amid the rupture caused by external events. Viewed through this lens, emotional memory is more than recollection; it is the ongoing process of reconnection.17

A more general question, however, lies outside the scope of psychological research: Why were most people in the West educated in moral principles—religious or secular—in the first place? Put more simply: Why were they taught the Ten Commandments or Kant’s categorical imperative rather than moral codes inspired by Plautus’ “man is a wolf to man,” or Hobbes’ vision of a “war of every man against every man”? Our answer is that the former resonates with the innate prewired human need to care and be cared for, while the latter do not. Put differently, extending the prewired innate need to care for others within one’s local community to a broader population is a natural process. In contrast, suppressing this need typically requires an individual to develop within an especially humiliating and violent environment.

Yet, as Tolstoy observed, despite all forms of moral education, acts of care—especially toward strangers—are far from automatic.

Back to Tolstoy and Beyond

Tolstoy believed that simply encountering a fellow human in need—even a stranger—should be enough to evoke empathy. Like him, caring for a few concrete people close to us, rather than for many remote and anonymous people, has its defenders among major moral philosophers, writers, and artists.

The epigraph at the beginning of this essay is from the renowned French poet René Char (1907–1988) and expresses his preference for the concrete individual over the abstract notion of humankind. The concrete individual, the individual face, was also the main theme of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), one of the twentieth century’s leading moral philosophers:

Through the face, the being is not merely enclosed within its form and offered to the hand …. The face is an irreducible mode by which a being can present itself in its identity. Things, on the other hand, are what never present themselves personally and, ultimately, lack identity. Violence applies to the thing.18

In other words, Levinas, who also wrote about the fate of Jews in the WWII, associates care—the hand—with the possibility of knowing the individual face. Inversely, humans are capable of violence to someone anonymous.19 In a certain sense, Levinas provides a philosophical answer to the question posed in the preceding section: Why did the rescuers choose to save Jews they had never previously encountered? But Levinas is not the only French thinker who emphasizes the key value of one specific face, one concrete human.

In a 1957 press conference, following his Nobel Prize in Literature, French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) declared, “I have always condemned terror …. At this very moment, bombs are being thrown into the trams of Algiers. My mother could be on one of those trams. If this is what justice is, I prefer my mother.”20

Following this declaration, Sartre, who was an unconditional supporter of Algerian independentists, broke up with him. Camus made this statement in the context of the war in his native Algeria, which, though an integral part of France at the time, was viewed by many as an unjust colonial possession. Like Levinas, he emphasizes that the life of a concrete innocent human being—not to mention one’s mother—is more important than any grand, remote cause.

Another influential writer and philosopher who championed “just and loving attention” to individual human beings over abstract moral frameworks was British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919–1999). In her seminal philosophical work, The Sovereignty of Good, she critiqued both existentialism—as represented by Sartre—and utilitarianism.21 American writer David Brooks summarizes her moral philosophy as follows:

For Murdoch, the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly … representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends …. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.22

The great Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) offers a striking illustration of such “seeing attention.” He once said, “If there were a fire in my workshop, and I had to save either a cat or the work of my entire life, the question wouldn’t even arise for a second… And [even if, for a cat, it was to sacrifice] all ‘Rubens,’ all ‘Titian’.”23 In a sense, Giacometti’s choice is even starker than Camus’, as he places a living being above his own artwork—even above masterpieces of immense aesthetic value to humankind—despite his identity as an artist.

These positions fundamentally challenge moral choices based on the cost-benefit analysis of utilitarianism or even on abstract universal principles. Such analysis justifies certain small sacrifices for the greater good, while these artists believe that no cause, however grand, justifies the sacrifice of an innocent human being or even a pet.

Even though we have quoted the above thinkers and artists, we are well aware that arguments can’t settle moral philosophy debates. That said, philosophical positions can be assessed in terms of their practical implications. That’s what Fodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), another great Russian novelist and Tolstoy’s contemporary, set out to achieve. He placed the question of whether intellectual rationalization or empathy should form the basis for moral choice at the very heart of many of his novels. Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, is his best-known work dealing with this conflict.

Its protagonist Raskolnikov becomes obsessed with an old pawnbroker woman as he increasingly pawns his belongings to her to borrow money. Murdering the woman appears to be a way out of poverty, to build the career he believes he deserves. Yet, Raskolnikov needs an unselfish moral justification for the murder. Here is how Dostoyevsky describes it early in the novel. During this episode, Raskolnikov hears a student who happened to know the old pawnbroker and shares his idea about her:

On one hand we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief …. On the other hand, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money …. Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from … hospitals …. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all.

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse …. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all …. Would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? … It’s simple arithmetic!24

After listening to the student, Raskolnikov is amazed that the same idea was born in his mind a little while ago.

The second justification for this murder came from his view of himself as an extraordinary person, destined to bring good to humanity. Now it’s Raskolnikov himself speaking:

I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound … to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.25

Of course, it’s Dostoyevsky’s genius, which illustrates the moral dilemma in such a stark manner. However, his general question is whether the murder of one person can be justified by “thousands of good deeds” this person prevents. Dostoyevsky’s answer is a clear “no.” He further deepens it in his novel The Possessed, published six years later through its character Verhovenski, an advocate for the sacrifice of a “hundred million heads”:

Do you, whatever it may imply, prefer a quicker way which will at last untie your hands, and will let humanity make its own social organisation in freedom and in action, not on paper? They shout, “a hundred million heads”; that may be only a metaphor; but why be afraid of it …?26

In other words, Dostoyevsky’s answer is clear: however good and grand one’s ends, they don’t justify evil means, the suffering of even one innocent. Moreover, according to Dostoyevsky, such an “arithmetic” of sacrifices for the greater good will inevitably lead to major crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, Dostoyevsky was prophetic. The number of innocent victims of the Nazi and Communist ideological regimes of the twentieth century reached, according to historians, “a hundred million heads,” all in the name of the greater good these ideologies promised.

We can sometimes hear the argument that the horrible consequences of implementing some philosophies and ideologies do not invalidate them; rather it is the fault of the politicians who misunderstood them. Still, the historical fact that none of these philosophies led to the “greater good” that they promised and all of them led to millions of sacrificed innocent lives casts a doubt on the philosophies themselves.

In sum, although Western moral education seeks to extend the innate need to care for those nearby into a universal obligation to care for all, many moral philosophers, writers, and artists do not share this view. Moreover, they argue that striving to care for remote and anonymous humanity often leads individuals to neglect those they face in their immediate lives.

The Virtues of Local Government

You may view this essay as theoretical, but it sheds light on many seemingly puzzling facts about whom we trust and care about. For instance, year after year, Gallup surveys reveal that Americans report having significantly more trust and confidence in local government than in the federal government. In a 2023 survey, 67% of respondents expressed either a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in “local governments in the area where you live” when it comes to handling local problems, compared to only 37% who said the same about “the federal government to handle domestic problems.”27 Furthermore, in a 2024 survey, 51% of respondents expressed trust in the police, a local institution, compared to only 9% who said the same about Congress—the lowest-ranked among 17 US institutions.28 The same trend of significantly higher trust in local governments compared to national governments is observed across all Organization for Economic Corporation and Development (OECD) countries.29

A similar disparity applies to companies. For example, 68% of Americans report having a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in small businesses—the most trusted US institution—compared to only 16% who express confidence in big businesses, which rank as the third least trusted institution, just above Congress and television news.30

Although national governments and big businesses provide many important services, we are inherently inclined to notice and value the care offered by local actors. This has major implications for the type of care that may be truly effective in connecting with people. As the American philosopher Christopher Lasch (1935–1994) put it:

We love and respect particular individuals, not humanity as a whole, and that the seductive promise of universal brotherhood is a poor substitute for local communities in which the holders of power are immediately accountable to their neighbors.31

Moreover, many of today’s global issues can be understood through the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” an observation first noted by Aristotle: “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest.” But, as Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom demonstrated, escaping this tragedy is not achieved through either privatization or strict government control of common-pool resources. According to Ostrom, local communities possess specialized local knowledge that enables them to self-govern and sustainably manage common resources through collective decision-making.32

To recall the biblical warning about paradise and the eye of a needle, regular philanthropists, even though they do a lot of good, seem not to be ready to pass through yet. However, it’s the utilitarian philanthropists who seem to head in the totally opposite direction of paradise. In fact, the road to paradise seems to be literally narrow, when we know that the maximum number of humans that can be truly cared about is 150 people—a figure that definitely favors leaders of small businesses or of small business units in larger decentralized corporations.

Instead of pursuing abstract or remote philanthropical goals, perhaps the key is for business leaders to just focus on solving the social challenges of their own employees, their clients, their suppliers, and the host communities as ends in themselves. Perhaps, instead of looking for a social silver bullet, they can accomplish it by implementing a bundle of mutually supportive measures systematically transforming the way their particular business operates, and how their employees, their clients, their suppliers, and their host communities work and live. Perhaps, they can lead this transformation themselves while at the helm of their companies. If the answer is yes to these three questions, we may see more and more the rise of what we call “caring companies”—businesses playing a decisive role in tackling the social and environmental challenges of our time, and as their number increases—in revitalizing capitalism.

* This article is a slightly adapted chapter, originally published in The Caring Company: How to Shift Business and The Economy for Good. New York: Wiley, 2025, pp. 75–95. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com.

Isaac Getz is an author, speaker, professor at ESCP Business School in Paris, and was formerly a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities; he also writes poetry. Laurent Marbacher is a senior advisor and leadership development expert; he is also a painter.

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