As I write these last paragraphs, the global economic system we have continues to do very well indeed for a minority of people. At the same time, the rate of extreme poverty worldwide remains high. The inroads into extreme poverty that we have made over these last few decades have been largely the result of the work of a few countries, notably China. There remain, in extreme poverty, a few hundred million in India, more across Africa. Others are spread around in parts of South America and elsewhere. We are talking here about people in our time living on around US$1.90 or less a day. The World Bank wants to get that figure to zero by 2030 but this is really very ambitious and every day this situation persists, people suffer and children are born into servitude.

Consider also, since the mid-1970s, both the USA and the UK have become less rather than more equal (per the gini coefficient, a widely used measure of equality). As of 2012, the bottom half of society in the USA owns just 3% of the wealth and 19% are below the poverty line. In the UK these figures stand at 5% and 9% respectively.

Those are but two examples of the negative consequences of our system. Persistent extreme poverty in the developing world sits alongside persistent inequality in the developed world.

As we live through global recessions and austere governments, thin gruel for savers and bone-dry public services, as market failures that mean that the poor pay poverty premiums for basic goods and lack access to the things we take for granted persist, the question is asked repeatedly and honestly: are we really happy that this must be our lot? Put more constructively: how do we improve on the system we have so that the fruits of the good life can be enjoyed by more of us?

Throughout this book we have adumbrated the idea of the moral marketplace being a rebuke to the system – the capitalism – we have. We asked whether, at the point where capitalism meets philanthropy, something new emerges that may be fairer and greater than the current dispensation.

Let’s try to clarify that idea. We are not talking here about doing away with money, marketplaces or exchanges.