Do Non-Profits Drive Social Change? | Hacker News Reader

Do Non-Profits Drive Social Change?

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26 pointsanarbadalov27 comments

This has to be the least rigorous essay that I’ve read in a while.

Somehow it manages to claim it’s taking on the huge issue of “do non-profits drive social change” while also:

- never citing a single piece of data or quoting any experts.

- proposing three unrelated “ideas” without even trying to make the claim that the three are the holistic.

- never mentioning the impact of non-profits in the developing world, or on the lower income folks in the developed world.

- never mentioning a successful social movement, or even defining what “social change” is.

- for some reason conflating “elite status” with social change.

- assuming that any non-profits have him as a target population (rich professor at a university) in the first place.

I honestly felt embarrassed for the author (and the editors that okayed this) while reading this essay.

I don’t think this should be on the front page.

——

Edit: I looked up what “Comment” was, since I hadn’t heard of the publication before. This is how they describe themselves:

> Comment is one of the core publications of Cardus, a think tank devoted to renewing North American social architecture, rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought.

I think this guy wanted to grind his axe on the topic of the corrupt non-profit industrial complex, but tried to bury it in a different essay and it didn’t work. That’s too bad because the NPIC exists and is corrupted and you are allowed to write about it (see: SF Standard’s recent article about TODCO).

The author seems to be pointing out that the difference between 'for-profit' and 'non-profit' is not quite as clear as one might expect, and that the popular notion that 'non-profit' implies some selfless, virtuous, do-gooder agenda is not well-supported.

As far as data, the fact that religious US non-profits have yearly revenues on the order of $400 billion a year is included, although the article could have included the total size of the US non-profit economy (~$2.5 trillion). (I imagine religious non-profits in the Islamic world are at least as large).

Your comment seems to be pushing back against this arguably cynical view of the motivations of non-profits and other 'workers for good'. It is a discussion worth having, so calling for it to be removed is, well, sort of supporting the thesis if you follow.

This article could use a single point of evidence to support any of its ideas or claims. Or even just a quote from someone who represents one of the viewpoints it props up. Otherwise how do I distinguish a misguided narrative from propaganda or the truth?

This article feels like the academic version of "people are saying..."

"> And what have non-profits done for me as a consumer or user, putting aside the ones I work at—namely, George Mason University and the Mercatus Center? That is harder to say. They might have helped with my health care, except I haven’t been sick. They have contributed to the social fabric in ways I don’t always see directly. Without non-profits, perhaps my community would be more fractious and less generous and the streets would be dirtier. Maybe! But that is not as easy to see as an Amazon package left on the doorstep. Churches I will consider later."

Um, yeah, I don't find it very surprising that Tyler Cowen, an academic, influential writer and famous cultural critic isn't directly getting help from his local food bank. Oh, and I love the "putting aside the ones I work at". Let's cherry pick and say "non-profits have do nothing for me personally" if you exclude the ones that do a tremendous amount for me personally. Even with the above, I find this pretty disingenuous. Surely Tyler Cowen has visited and enjoyed some famous art museums? Perhaps he has taken his kids to a local science museum? Perhaps he has benefitted from research done at universities, as pretty much everyone alive has?

That said, I can agree with him on his point that perhaps certain non-profits (e.g. hospitals) don't really function like most people would think a non-profit should and probably shouldn't be getting tax exempt status.

> Surely Tyler Cowen has visited and enjoyed some famous art museums? Perhaps he has taken his kids to a local science museum? Perhaps he has benefitted from research done at universities, as pretty much everyone alive has?

The department in which he is tenured is basically funded by the Koch Bros' non-profit complex. He owes his entire career and current standing to them and their agenda-driven funding strategy.

Everyone also gets to sit back and feel good that non-profits are feeding people in emergencies, delivering life saving water, reporting on atrocities, and swooping in to provide medical care and dig people out of rubble after a disaster or war crime.

> And what have non-profits done for me as a consumer or user...That is harder to say

This is such a bizarre thing for a wealthy white dude to say. Non-profits are specifically there to help people who aren't helped by for-profit corporations: the poor and disenfranchised.

This article discusses American non-profits, which I've found to be a very American solution to a very American problem of eliminating governments' abilities to solve social problems, while concentrating wealth in a small class of private elites. The problems still need to be solved, but now they need to include an appeal to the egos of wealthy donors.

As the article notes, many non-profits are often little more than tax avoidance structures - one sign of this is bloated salaries paid to the upper-tier executives. This is described as 'the economic theory':

> "From an economic point of view, it could be said that a fair percentage of America’s non-profits are phony non-profits of a sort. In these cases, the non-profit isn’t a major vehicle for social change; rather, it is a bunch of profit-seeking vehicles with a tax break, masquerading as non-profits."

The religion and television theories the article introduces are very interesting - i.e. the notion that non-profits are 'seeding ideas into media', and the fact that religious non-profits "have yearly revenues around $378 billion." This points to the role of non-profits in what might be called deliberate social engineering attempts of various sorts.

An addition category, however, could be "the government theory", since non-profits have been heavily utilized by governments as cutouts for state propaganda, often in partnership with private interests. Non-profits are not very transparent when it comes to sources of funding. In this context, they're generally referred to as 'non-governmental organizations' (NGOs). A fairly notorious example is the Ford Foundation and the CIA, dating back to the 1950s, e.g.

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/FordFandCIA.html

It's hardly just the US government doing this - other actors include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, etc. Propaganda-wise, this is called 'relying on independent third-party credibility', aka 'gray propaganda'. More generally:

https://knowledgenuts.com/difference-between-gray-white-and-...

For six years I took a swing out of government and ran a nonprofit. It was a 501(c)4 which meant that it was not tax deductible because the nonprofit lobbied lawmakers.

In that time, I worked with a broad spectrum of science and healthcare, based on profits, and sadly my own opinion is that the vast majority of them DO NOT drive social change.

They burn money mostly preaching to the choir.

If you really want to know, if a nonprofit actually drives social change, look at what they promised at the first of the year, and look at what they are able to accomplish on their own by the end of the year. In the advocacy side of things, most nonprofits claim victory for other people's work.

When you really hold their feet to the fire, and say, what did you, specifically, accomplish on your own, it has for me during those six years been nearly universally nothing.

I started my career at the Red Cross, so I don't tend to question their value. But no one is pulling down a salary that comes close to matching their potential there.

Change in the bank accounts of the people running them for sure. As the profits are spent of their salaries. Outrageously large salaries, more often than not.

If/where non-profits are effective, I would expect that's largely through the time and effort of people staffing them, and unless it's all volunteer labor, I would expect those people are paid. And if they're effective at solving social problems, they're probably pretty talented and providing social benefit, which would likely leave us with below average or above 2σ salaries as outrageous.

So... I wouldn't expect that I can make effective judgments about the sector based on people being well-paid, which means I should probably try and focus on impacts.

No.

Betteridge says no.

The alternative to non-profits driving social change is for-profits driving social change.

You don't want a morality designed by capitalism.

For-profits fund non-profits, no?

Individuals fund them as well. And governments.

Both for-profit entities :)

Or voting. Voting tends to drive social change. At least in democratic countries. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to maintain the status quo and hopes you don't vote.

While true, who will ensure people will make an informed choice? I don't think awareness of e.g. environmental issues - which may influence someone's vote - would exist if it wasn't for nonprofits.

Non-profits are not necessarily operating outside capitalism. They can be highly capitalistic too.

Indeed, one of the most profitable non-profits in my area is a health insurance company. To make sure they are truly 'non-profit' by some legal definition, they dump a lot of money into local real estate. They quietly own a good chunk of downtown. Non-profit my ass.

Not making a profit on paper means they're a nonprofit, I guess. Nonprofit does not equate altruism, and often smells like tax avoidance.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a "non-profit".

> You don't want a morality designed by capitalism.

We're getting one whether we want it or not.

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