Smith did believe that private interest could serve the larger collective - but only if those interests were regulated effectively. The new philanthro-capitalists are espousing a bastardized version of laissez-faire economics, which conveniently neglects the fact that forms of regulatory intervention and control are necessary as a check on private profiteering.

Sociologist Linsey McGoey explores the ways in which a new breed of philanthropists - from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - are actually increasing global inequality and instability as they work to expand corporate influence into the laws and lives of the people they claim to aid, while turning charity into industry and extracting profit from the most vulnerable.

Linsey is author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy from Verso Books.