With Musk's record breaking donation to charity in the news it's worth taking a critical look at philanthropy: does it help more than it hurts?
I recently finished reading Anand Giridharandas’ 2019 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. It’s a very interesting, if rather grim, exploration of the philosophy of philanthropy in America, and specifically how neo-liberal economics, meritocratic ideals, and veneration for start-up founders have produced an ideology which places enormous value on giving which is paradoxically incapable of effectively solving the societal issues philanthropists spend enormous time, energy, and money to combat. Giridharandas argues persuasively that an insistence on win-win solutions, preferring to talk about poverty instead of inequality, and menrtally keeping business and philanthropy separate makes many big American philanthropists seeing many individual trees instead of a forest; incapable of seeing the sickness for the symptoms.
Winners Take All is especially interesting in light of Capital in the 21st Century in my opinion. Piketty’s book shows how Western societies have become less egalitarian since the early 80’s, in no small part due to the political shift from the more interventionist economic policies which were common in the post-WWII era to the Thatcher/Reagan insistence that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” as Reagan himself put it. Giridharandas explains that an important part of why plutocrats engaging in philanthropy can never be as effective as government in say reducing poverty is the much more limited reach a charity has compared to the government, and the dogmatic insistence that everything the government does the private sector can do twice as well which is core to the Thatcher/Reagan viewpoint is not only resulting in worse outcomes than if the government had been in charge, it is also a lot less democratic and a lot more opaque.
Furthermore, Giridharandas argues that a better way for plutocrats to make a difference is to improve working conditions, and generally improving business practices. No matter how many libraries and schools the Sackler’s build it’s hard to see that weighing up the damage that OxyContin wrought; and giving away huge sums of money made in an unethical way makes for a complicated moral calculus. I haven’t touched on a quarter of what the book is about, but I felt that it is a book worth recommending as it’s both very good and quite topical given Elon Musk’s enormous charity donation, about which no one seems to know anything except headline sum. I don’t think that charitable giving is inherently harmful for society, but I aspire to think critically on the blog, and it’s too easy to praise philanthropists for their contributions while having no idea of how the money is spent, or if it makes a real difference.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson