Nicholas Kristof and Stacy Schiff this morning. Mr. Kristof tells us what’s buzzing at Davos at the World Economic Forum and Ms. Schiff calls Darth Cheney what he is – a hypocrite. Mr. Kristof first:

The World Economic Forum here in Davos is the kind of place where if you let yourself get distracted while walking by a European prime minister on your left, you could end up tripping over a famous gazillionaire — and then spilling your coffee onto the king on your right. But perhaps the most remarkable people to attend aren’t the world leaders or other bigwigs.

Rather, they are the social entrepreneurs. Davos, which has always been uncanny in peeking just ahead of the curve to reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, swarmed with them.

So what’s a social entrepreneur? Let me give a few examples among those at the forum in Davos.

• In Africa, where children die of diarrhea from bad sanitation, Isaac Durojaiye runs a franchise system for public toilets. He supplies mobile toilets to slum areas, where unemployed young people charge a small fee for their use. The operators keep 60 percent of the income and pass the rest back to Mr. Durojaiye’s company, Dignified Mobile Toilets, which uses the money to buy new toilets.

• Nic Frances runs a group that aims to cut carbon emissions in 70 percent of Australian households over 10 years. His group, Easy Being Green, gives out low-energy light bulbs and low-flow shower heads — after the household signs over the rights to the carbon emissions the equipment will save. The group then sells those carbon credits to industry to finance its activities, and it is now aiming to expand globally.

• In the U.S., Gillian Caldwell and her group, Witness, train people around the world to use video cameras to document human rights abuses. The resulting videos have drawn public attention to issues like child soldiers and the treatment of the mentally ill. Now Ms. Caldwell aims to create a sort of YouTube for human rights video clips.

Social entrepreneurs like Ms. Caldwell resemble traditional do-gooders in their yearning to make the world a better place, but sound like chief executives when they talk about metrics to assess cost-effectiveness. Many also generate income to finance expansion.

“We’re totally self-sustaining,” said Mirai Chatterjee, a dynamo who is coordinator of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India. “From Day 1 our idea was to run a strong economic organization.” Ms. Chatterjee’s organization now has nearly 1 million members, owns a bank, runs 100 day care centers, trains midwives and provides health insurance for 200,000 women. It is empowering women and fighting poverty across a growing swath of rural India, and its down-to-earth approach is characteristic of social entrepreneurs.

“Politics is failing to solve all the big issues,” said Jim Wallis, who wrote “God’s Politics” and runs Sojourners, which pushes social justice issues. “So when that happens, social movements rise up.”

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, demonstrated with Grameen Bank the power of microfinancing. His bank has helped raise incomes, secure property rights for women, lower population growth and raise education standards across Bangladesh — and now the success is rippling around the globe.

One of those inspired by Mr. Yunus, for example, was Roshaneh Zafar, a young Pakistani economist. She quit her job and started Kashf, a microfinance institution that now gives hundreds of thousands of Pakistani women a route out of poverty.

Ms. Zafar also received help from Ashoka, a hugely influential organization for social entrepreneurs started by an American, Bill Drayton (who describes social entrepreneurs as “the most important historical force at work today”). Ashoka is one of a growing number of donor groups that offer the equivalent of venture capital for social entrepreneurs.

“The key with social entrepreneurs is their pragmatic approach,” said Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is affiliated with the World Economic Forum. “They’re not out there with protest banners; they’re actually developing concrete solutions.”

When I travel around the world, I’m blown away by how these people are transforming lives. A growing number of the best and brightest university graduates in the U.S. and abroad are moving into this area (many clutching the book “How to Change the World,” a bible in the field).

It’s one of the most hopeful and helpful trends around. These folks aren’t famous, and they didn’t fly to Davos in first-class cabins or private jets, but they are showing that what it really takes to change the world isn’t so much wealth or power as creativity, determination and passion.

To comment on this column, and to post a link to your favorite social entrepreneur, go to www.nytimes.com/ontheground. Last week, the was an outpouring of reader responses to Mr. Kristof's column from Jan. 23 about classical analogies to the situation in Iraq. He's chosen his favorites and all the responses have been cataloged in "On the Ground."

I’m going to slide in a small plug for www.kiva.org, where you can make microloans for sums as low as $25 to help small business entrepreneurs in a number of countries. Please check it out.

Now Ms. Schiff on Darth Cheney and etiquette:

Once upon a time, asking about someone’s children was like talking about the weather. Then again, once upon a time talking about the weather was also like talking about the weather — not a portal into the political or the apocalyptic. But that’s another story. The point is that children made for the kind of paltry social currency you could exchange with your in-flight neighbor, back when the only other option might have been: “As you’re carrying that knife and wearing full camouflage, is it safe to conclude that the vegetarian meal is mine?” Then came children as designer accessories and politically charged pawns, appendages and admissions statistics.

Suddenly, we are on treacherous ground. For starters, Angelina Jolie and Madonna can’t even agree on where babies come from. I thrill as quickly as the next People subscriber to a good catfight, but do we really need Angelina — who appears to have taken No Child Left Behind as her personal mantra — trashing celebrities for “jumping on the adoption bandwagon?”

As her swearing-in made clear, even Nancy Pelosi feels the need to accessorize, not something I would have thought a woman with a gavel would ever need to do. Yes, by comparison the back of the House looked like a bouncer convention. But the dais looked like a Sunday school class. Which raises a parenthetical question: Do female politicians have to kiss babies? For that matter — this question is for someone other than Senator Boxer or Secretary Rice — do they need to have babies?

There are now officially only two people left in America who don’t want to talk about their kids. When Jim Webb bowed out of that White House receiving line, President Bush tracked him down and asked after his son. Senator Webb is a former Navy secretary; he knows his protocol. He is also one of only a few members of the U.S. Senate with children serving in the military. “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Mr. Webb replied. “That’s not what I asked you,” Mr. Bush snapped. Mr. Webb didn’t really mean to answer, either. Evidently, he meant to slug the president.

Last week Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney about his pregnant lesbian daughter. The vice president looked as if his arm had made contact with that meat grinder. Mr. Blitzer was, he growled, seriously out of line.

Neither Senator Webb nor Vice President Cheney wins points for his social graces. But what Letitia Baldrige said of the Webb encounter — “It was an uncivil reply to an uncivil remark” — does not apply equally to the vice president. Mr. Cheney has openly promoted an anti-gay agenda. His own base has called his daughter’s pregnancy unconscionable. Family values have been his calling card. And our Prohibitionist vice president can’t summon the courage to address the gin mill in the basement?

Mr. Webb was rude on principle; Mr. Cheney rude out of hypocrisy. One man took a stand. The other scurried away.

What the vice president’s nonresponse did deliver was a very cogent message: the rules apply to you, but not to us. It’s our privacy, your patriotism; our delusion, your sacrifice; our tax cuts, your kids. After all, as Mr. Cheney so tellingly said of his Republican critics, “I’m the vice president, and they’re not.” The part for which some of us have no stomach is the sense of entitlement.

An annoying thing about children is that they nudge you toward the high road and the long view. They demand pesky things like open-mindedness, self-denial, accountability, leadership and occasionally even integrity — qualities that appear to have packed up and gone home with Hans Blix. Once upon a time, you might have termed them family values.

So as to spare Mr. Cheney any further misadventures in this minefield, I did a little research for him. Several years ago, Ms. Baldrige foresaw his predicament. “A lesbian’s parents may be the victims of probing, mean questions from their friends,” she wrote. “Hopefully, they will answer unequivocally that they stand by their child and accept her decision.”

As for gay and lesbian couples, they are families, too, in Ms. Baldrige’s book. They are also increasingly common, “so people who feel shy and uptight with them are just going to have to get over it.” Alternatively, they are welcome to talk about the weather.

Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” She is a guest columnist.