Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has contributed $100 million to create a better grading system than the existing one, and Mayor Bloomberg has put $30 million of his own money into the Young Men's Initiative in New York City, with matching funding from George Soros.

November saw the death of the charismatic financier Teddy Forstman, a philanthropist who responded to America's failing education system by setting up the Children's Scholarship Fund, a programme that has provided scholarships worth $483 million for 123,000 low-income children to get into private schools. For all that President Obama is trying to stir up class resentment against "the millionaires and billionaires", they are getting the government's job done for it, and doing it with far lower overheads, costs and interdepartmental squabbling.

Outside America, it's much the same story. In 1970, seven of every ten dollars given by the US to the developing world came from the government bureaucracy, which controlled every aspect of spending. Today, that amounts to a mere 15 per cent, with the rest coming from private capital and philanthropy, corporations and NGOs.

The Gates Foundation, which has spent more in the past decade on neglected-disease research than all the world's governments combined, has been so dissatisfied with the authorities' health indexes that it is funding the development of brand-new metrics for ranking developing world health systems. Other companies also bypass the sclerotic state system and go straight to the heart of the problem, in a huge way: PepsiCo recently gave $8 million to water.org which will improve water sanitation for 800,000 Indians.

Private involvement has even extended into foreign affairs. A recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, somewhat provocatively entitled "The New Colonialists", reports that in Georgia in the former USSR, American NGOs "have come to wield an inordinate amount of influence since the country emerged from Soviet rule. Today, its pro-Western president is supported by a steady dose of financial and political aid from abroad, and many state functions are financed or managed by outside help."

Before Georgia's Rose Revolution, foreign political consultants advised the opposition on its campaign strategy, and the American consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has been hired to help rebuild state ministries from the ground up, recruiting and training new staff. American technocrat-consultants are now, the magazine states, "participating in day-to-day decision-making on critical national matters, such as political reform and intelligence sharing". This was the kind of thing the State Department and CIA used to advise upon sotto voce in the past: today the job is being done by private corporations.