Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving
academictimes.com
academictimes.com
I believe it is much better than the alternative: That they are controlled by those who don't put the money.
As an real example: In Spain there were public banks created by the Catholic Church(from the Italian model) in order to lend money to people that needed it, they were called "cajas de ahorro".
While it was controlled by the Church they worked really well for almost two hundred years. With the democracy the political parties said that as public institutions, it needed to be controlled by "the people". The people meaning of course politicians and unions.
Politicians destroyed cajas redirecting the money to themselves, and specially putting incompetent people in charge that destroyed them after making dumb decisions.
Now there are no cajas in Spain, all have been privatized after all went bankrupt.
Also when I was young I volunteered for a famous humanitarian NGO that helps people all around the world. Or so I thought, after working very hard for 6 months I realized most of the money was wasted in those that were up in the chain of command in the NGO and in Africa bureaucracy(tribal leaders in Africa got to control most of the food and medicines that we sent), not in those that needed it.
> While it was controlled by the Church they worked really well for almost two hundred years. With the democracy the political parties said that as public institutions, it needed to be controlled by "the people". The people meaning of course politicians and unions.
Furthermore, while so many so-called "charities" are really just fronts for the enrichment of those administering it, Catholic charities spend extremely little on administration. Over 90% of funds go toward the actual people they're serving. Many of those involved have even taken vows of poverty themselves. The Catholic foundation behind them have the effect of giving them a strong, principled direction that charities running on vague, sentimental motives will necessarily lack. Meaning, the people involved are more likely to be motivated by doing actual good and "squandering" their own lives for the good of those they are serving because it is part of the Catholic understanding of reality itself.
> humanitarian NGO
NGOs are a hotbed of dysfunction. Take, for example, donated and second-hand clothing and so-called "mitumba". African cotton, textile, and clothing industries have been utterly destroyed by the influx of free clothing from the West. Now, this is likely just the result of ignorance and thoughtlessness, but if I were a foreign cotton magnate worried about growing competition from African cotton, or perhaps rising costs in my supply chain which runs through Africa, I might want to encourage "charities" and ragpickers that flood the African market with free clothing to eliminate that competition. Better to give your used clothing to local charities that serve people at home (I believe St. Vincent de Paul does this; would avoid Goodwill).
Those who control the money flow have huge power. Charity was always about giving money while keeping power.
In the last 20 years the growing class of super-billionaires started acting like in a feudal society.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijmr.12247?...
The key thing is if the charitable work is actually useful of course, but that’s a separate conversation.
There was a nice discussion on hacker news recently about Martin Nowak's research on this topic that was largely funded by Jeffrey Epstein, and as a result was likely designed to serve as a foil for a billionaire convicted child-rapist who was facing impending federal charges at the time for the sex-trafficking of minors:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442060
Nowak's punishment for his role in aiding and abetting an accused sex-trafficker?
https://harvardmagazine.com/2021/03/martin-nowak-sanctioned-...
Claudine Gay has decided that Martin Nowak only needs to serve two years of probation for openly aiding and abetting a convicted child rapist and accused child sex-trafficker by conspiring with fellow accused child molester and Harvard law professor (and also Epstein best buddy) Alan "Dershbag" Dershowitz to help Mr. Epstein evade prosecution on pending federal racketeering charges ... in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to Harvard from Epstein's estimated $500 million estate, that was laundered in part through other members of Mr. Epstein's billionaire child sex-trafficking ring that included Les Wexner, Leon Black, and Glenn Dubin.
Hopefully there are a few like-minded students at Harvard that will keep the pressure alive on their university's administration like these brave souls over at MIT are doing:
https://thetech.com/2021/02/25/mit-administration-epstein-op...
Nowak used to write papers on how punishment "serves no noble purpose" as part of the interference with the legal process that Nowak was running for Epstein.
Actually, one of the principal reasons why the courts can sentence folks like Epstein and Nowak under the federal RICO statute for up to a lifetime sentence in prison, in addition to seizing his assets (and possibly those of Harvard and MIT as well) under the criminal forfeiture provision of that statute, is not just for "punishment."
It's for deterrence.
The message that law enforcement sends by not prosecuting Epstein's co-conspirators at schools like Harvard and MIT, that include Nowak and several others, is that there are no real legal consequences for this type of behavior.
And so what again we see here is a prime example of how the real discrimination that takes place in the United States judicial system regarding who gets punished and who escapes scot-free has less to do with skin color than it does with the size of your bank account, and in Nowak's case, the size of your culpable employer's bank account too.
Government donations are also often self serving with it coming as coupons to buy goods from said country, quite often for things the beneficiary country doesn't need.
Copying text from the "view-source" version of the page works well enough. eg:
Between 2013 and 2015, governments of developed nations
provided $462 billion in overseas aid while philanthropists
contributed $24 billion, according to data from the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Is the fact that Bill Gates gets positive press from his foundation bad? Not really, as long as his foundation does good things. But is it fair that Bill Gates gets to decide what research gets funded from him when there are a bunch of worthy projects that won’t make the cut simply because they aren’t one of Bill’s pet interests? I’m undecided.
The capitalist/libertarian in me says that if someone made the money, they should get to decide how to spend it. But that may not be what’s best for the world, so another side of me says that money should be taxed and a committee of experts should decide what’s best for the world. But then the libertarian side retorts with the idea that most governments are doing a shit job at managing the money they have now, and they will misuse additional money even more. So maybe we should just let rich people have their charity projects, even if they are self serving. At least this way some Africans learn how to code and get medical research funding, the likely alternative is more bridges to nowhere and bloated military acquisition projects.
This is of course true, but the opposite it true as well. Regardless, this misses the point. The reason people want public interest spending to be conducted by the government is that, with government spending, there is at least some opportunity for democratic (i.e. public) oversight. With private spending, there is only oversight from invested parties.
Look at the F35 thread that appears here now and again. Loads and loads of congressional districts involved, loads and loads of people with a stake. It still ended up costing an insane amount more than it needed to.
With private actually I don't think it's all that different though, the difference is some of the private ventures are allowed to die once the failure is complete.
Totally agree that public interest ought to matter, just I don't see that it actually holds people to account.
There's an argument that you get the same dynamic either way. In political science it's the problem of "concentrated benefits and diffused costs". Only "invested parties" pay for lobbyists (e.g., Intuit/Turbotax). Others (e.g., everyone who does taxes once a year) find it easier/"cheaper" to put up with the annoyance than to exercise "oversight".
Most businesses fail. Hell, most Google products have failed. As such, overall private spending is woefully inefficient (despite a few big successes), and government spending is relatively very efficient.
Governments have the ability to tax in order to fund spending.
Businesses have to fund their spending out of either their revenues or their debt/equity funding. Is it any wonder that businesses fail more often than governments?
If the measure of government efficiency is return on the tax dollar, then by the same yardstick the benefits generated by most businesses are infinitely efficient.
- first, government spending is highly scrutinised, by the convention that people expect every tax dollar to be spent in a way that they deem worthy;
- whereas, most private businesses are not scrutinised in any sort of comparable way (often not even when they are spending tax dollars - which they can, directly and indirectly).
Remove: Sales Tax, Punitive Fines, Import Taxes, Stamp Duties
Keep: Income tax (even raise it if you want)
Add: Held wealth tax (if you want, or go full progressive and replace income with this)
Imagine a government uses tax payer money to install a bench in the park. This bench has a distinguished businessman’s name brazened on the front of it, and this bench is poorly placed and no one sits in it, providing no utility to society. In this example, the public has every right to be disgruntled, they can call their representatives, media organizations etc., or just talk about the stupidity and incompetence of their government and vote new, equally incompetent, people in their place instead. When a government does something like this, it’s not working right.
Imagine the park is owned by a private nonprofit. The business man donates money to the nonprofit to install the bench, the business man gets a dollar for dollar tax deduction on the bench, and the nonprofit rewards him by having his name put on the bench. No one uses the bench and it provides no utility.
In either case, the real results for society is the same. The only difference is that for the nonprofit case the system works the way it’s supposed to.
In real life what you get is that moneyed elites get a boost in status from their donations. How can you demand demand good behavior from people with no accountability?
Will those qualifications be good for anything else than Facebook? Will Zuck support that the pay grade eventually rises to the same level as developed countries or will he try to keep it down? What kind of quality of life and health hazards do those newly created jobs entail?
Regarding Facebook, I remember the whole scandal about "content moderators". Facebook's solution to content moderation was as follows: Create thousands of clickworker jobs in the Philippines and similar countries with ultra-low wages and no worker protection. Each "moderator" was effectively a factory worker who was presented by Facebook's software with a steady stream of reprehensible and horrifying images and posts. They had to decide for each instance whether or not it violated Facebook's TOS under time tracking.
No useful skills that are useful outside of that job, no potential for promotion or to make a career, serious risk of trauma and other mental health problems. But hey, jobs!
If you're financing something for self-serving reasons, then by definition, you aren't being charitable (caritas). If you can prove it, then perhaps tax exemptions should be removed. Rich people already exploit too many loopholes as it is.
> But is it fair that Bill Gates gets to decide what research gets funded from him when there are a bunch of worthy projects that won’t make the cut simply because they aren’t one of Bill’s pet interests?
Putting aside Gates for a second, there is no charity without a free act. If I am to act charitably, I must freely do so. There is no such thing as compelled or forced charity. Now, if there is a charity that does certain things and that decides how its funds are allocated, it should be transparent about that, and those who give are therefore consenting freely to fund those things. (Incidentally, this is why individual megadonors can be dangerous because charities can become dependent on them if they're not careful and subsequently allow themselves to be pressured by those donors to do what they want. The same is true of government funding. Many organizations, like universities, have been corrupted by the strings attached to such funding, esp. given that the conditions can change.)
In Gates' case, he has a foundation, yes, so it's his. So if he is funding _morally licit_ (and thus bona fide) charitable projects, then that's his free choice (I, of course, don't hold that to be the case; Gates is funding morally abhorrent causes as well). You can try to _persuade_ him to fund other things, of course.
> another side of me says that money should be taxed and a committee of experts should decide
The composition of that committee will determine the way money is distributed, and the differences will be radically different. I do believe in the morally objective, but practically speaking, we are very divided today about basic moral truths, so I would rather leave it up to private citizens. My only concern are rich donors who can single-handedly shape society with their money. However, I am not sure what we can really do about it, realistically.
Spending money on research and development programs with beneficial public health outcomes sounds good, unless you are a non-Gates backed researcher who has been working in the field for a long time and loses access to clinical facilities, data, and competitive grant funding because you get usurped by an organisation that has more political and economic influence than your NGO.
Who would have guessed!
But I'm going to be provocative because there is an elephant sized naked emperor in the room. Professional academics and their administrators generally live in an archipelago of planned economies that require exogenous revenue sources for "funding," the same way the oppressive bureaucracies of the 20th century depended on resource extraction to fund their systems. Where instead of mineral resource wealth, they live on "funding" that is extracted from elsewhere and then struggled for politically within the bureaucracy. Nobody has the advantage of making anything anyone wants, it's just a raw struggle for power as its own end.
Charities give, whereas bureaucracies fund in their own interests. We tolerate this academic luxury communism in the west because a free society means letting people live as they choose, and in return, they run a cash for honours racket that occasionally produces some strategic technologies. The trouble starts when they get bored (like in this article) and won't stay in their lane.
It's ironic that the last 30 years of critical theory has been about telling every other discipline that people can't be sincere or objective because of bias from their own power and interests, and yet we don't see these researchers attacking charity as utterly compromised by their role as launderers for political policy objectives that consolidate control by a captured state.
On this basis, I reject the argument that bureaucrats or their flatterers and apologists are better able to distribute wealth than the philanthropists and their families who made it.
As far as I can tell, the main criticisms leveled at elite philanthropists are:
1. they mainly support elite institutions
2. they spend money accumulating power to affect policy-making
3. their contribution to nonprofit funding pales in comparison to governments
4. they focus their philanthropic efforts on the developed world
5. they focus their philanthropic efforts on neoliberal causes
1 is sort of a good point. Harvard probably doesn't need another million dollars as much as the donor needs their name on a study room or whatever. But the paper also lumps a lot of stuff into the category of "elite institutions", including donating to big established charities and funding medical research at highly-ranked universities. Maybe those places are technically elite and powerful, but they might also be...good at their jobs? Efficient conduits for achieving the stated goals? Something beyond just being elite things that perpetuate elitism?
2 is also half-valid. I think we can all look at the Koch brothers and say, yup, they definitely wanted to affect American policy. But it's also consistent with wanting to affect meaningful change. The problem for the authors seems to lie in the fact that the change desired by elite philanthropists is fundamentally "neoliberal" (a term disdainfully peppered throughout this piece), and "neoliberal" is taken as synonymous with "self-serving". I'd guess there are plenty of people who are fine with this line of logic, but it seems important to the idea that philanthropy is "self-serving". That assumption is kind of just waved away in the paper.
3 is...yes? Governments do spend more money on nonprofits? This observation is repeatedly highlighted in the paper, but I don't know what the point of it is.
4 is a good point (although, again, the authors lump "funding scientific research at elite institutions" into this category, which seems like a stretch). I'm generally in favor of spending more money on the very poorest people.
5 is a generic criticism that I feel has become more common in the last few years: doing thing x is ultimately bad because it's just some marginal improvement that will entrench wage slavery instead of the revolution that will upend capitalism. I guess it's a thing you can argue, but you can also say it about...anything?
Overall, the paper spends a lot of energy arguing that "elite philanthropy looks a lot like people using their money to acquire social capital", but it marshals frustratingly little concrete evidence that this is actually what elite philanthropists are doing, or that elite philanthropy is unhelpful in any sense beyond having an appearance that can be uncharitably interpreted as self-serving. And this focus on optics is, IMO, lazy -- it conveniently obviates the need to actually dig into what's happening and its consequences, and frees you to just look at the surface and then build your own conclusions -- and not very useful.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijmr.12247?...
"Elites" have ecosystems that keep them rich, powerful, and elite of which these charities are enabling. When you donate fortunes to charities it allows you a certain voice both within the domain of that issue and more broadly. This leaves the shaping of society up to people seeking popularity, not people calculating what the "right" thing to do is. That voice, their money, and their influence have proven problematic in society or at a minimum are more problematic to the every day person who checks none of those boxes.
If you are an "elite" you will be rightly criticized at every turn, unless you keep to yourself which, as you pointed out, will likely lead to your demise as an elite.
Thinking "elites" are more corrupt than the average bureaucrat who manage the money if we took it away is just not reality.
> Thinking "elites" are more corrupt than the average bureaucrat who manage the money if we took it away is just not reality.
I don't think they're more corrupt, just probably as corrupt because often they're the same people or run in the same circles.
None of them are publicity machines, except in a very minor informational sense, and all are effective locally.
That stops being true above a certain size - specifically when a charity adopts the tropes of corporate culture and starts spending more time on "messaging" and "engagement" than delivery.
Inexplicably this seems to coincide with a hugely overpaid CEO and managerial staff.
I'm sure someone like Bill Gates can afford to compile a global index of tiny all-volunteer charities and donate significant sums to them.
But that kind of help won't have his name on it. It's not obvious it even interests him and his fellow billionaires.
It's "win/win" for the charities and philanthropists at the expense of everyone else. And there is a whole lot wrong with that.
>no-one in this ecosystem is actually interested in helping the poor/sick/kids or other powerless
A lot of people are, it's just they have no cash.
What's that supposed to imply? Anything that does not accept social darwinism is Communism and therefore Cannot Possibly Work?
The Nazis embraced social darwinism. We could see the results...