David Brooks presents a spot-on description of the modern social entrepreneur in “Thouroughly Modern Do-Gooders”, painting an accurate picture of the backgrounds, methodologies, and drive behind today’s new breed of social activist…

“The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital…

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and accountability-oriented. They’re always showing you multivariate regressions or explaining why some promising idea “didn’t pencil out.”

In classic Brook’s Bobos in Paradise fashion, he also calls out a more restrained sense of external identification amongst this new generation of social entrepreneurs…

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Brooks portrait is in many ways inspiring and the power of bringing market oriented solutions to global problems is undeniable, yet I do wonder if we will be doing so by sacrificing passion.  When he depicts the generation as “willfully blind to ideological issues” he does so as a compliment to our practicality, but by trading the irrational and helpful commitment that comes only from ideological drive do we risk burning out when our quantitatively and economically derived solutions do not pan out fast enough?  I certainly do not have the answer, but I believe it is important question for us to ask ourselves.