NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Tom Kalil & Anna McKelvey

There are 40,000 families globally with $100 million or more in wealth. These families could play a catalytic role in a 21st-century renaissance, in the same way that wealthy Italian families supported the Italian Renaissance. More recently, the Rockefeller Foundation supported the Green Revolution and the emergence of molecular biology as a new scientific discipline, and many foundations contributed to the child survival revolution that dramatically reduced child mortality in developing countries.

Photo courtesy of Diva Plavalaguna.