These Three Books Will Make You Rethink Philanthropy And Elite “World-Changing”

Books under review in this post

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (by Rob Reich)

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (by Anand Giridharadas)

Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (by Edgar Villanueva)

I won’t bury the lead. I’ve often worried about the chilling (not to mention controlling) effect grants have on non-profits.

And I believe that we should not deceive ourselves that we are practicing generous philanthropy when our wealth is the product of “distributional injustice.”

Don’t get me wrong. I apply for grants and seek funding for the work I do with non-profits. But when the non-profits I serve receive grants from an entity, especially an active large corporation in the community, it does change some things, in particular how you recipients use their voice for public advocacy when it may implicate the corporation giving the gift or grant.

It feels difficult to say simply this. There is  a general allergy to applying the hermeneutic of suspicion towards charitable gifts. You’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, right? When a billionaire makes a sizable donation to something that can change and improve the world, the general sentiment seems to be, “At least they’re doing something good with their wealth. Why look at it critically?”

The four books under review in this post all take the risk of looking at giving critically.

1. Philanthropy is only infrequently directed to the relief of poverty and aid for the disadvantaged (at most 1/3rd of all charity goes to assist the poor).
2. Philanthropy is not often a friend of equality, can be indifferent to equality, and can even be a cause of inequality.
3. Philanthropy is often specifically set up to disguise how the wealth given was earned at the expense of precisely those sometimes the gifts are then supposed to help.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better

Let’s begin with Rob Reich’s Just Giving. Just Giving is unique in considering the historical origins of philanthropy. An early chapter looks at the liturgical system of democratic Athens, the Islamic Waqf, and the 18th and 19th century democratic resistance to foundations (think John Stuart Mill). An essential conclusion looking at these historical systems: “When we think about philanthropy, we ought not consider and evaluate it only, or even primarily, as the decision of an individual to give money away for a public purpose. We must consider philanthropy also as an act with political dimensions, in the sense that philanthropy can be an expression of political power…wealthy elites can pose problems for democratic politics, even–and perhaps especially–when elites direct their wealth toward the public sphere.”

Tax incentives for philanthropy are structured unjustly. Not only does the incentive apply unequally to donors of different tax-filing statuses and income levels; “it’s that the public funds forgone in the tax deduction are flowing disproportionately to the favored charitable organizations of the rich. Tax policy in the realm of charity favors the wealthy and, by extension, weights the preferences of the wealthy over those of the poor in the nonprofit organizations they fund. The 1 percent receive a tax policy megaphone and the poor no or little policy amplification.”

Reich in his book offers two concrete proposals. First, he believes that philanthropic organizations can have a pluralizing effect in society that produces social goods and diminishes state orthodoxy. But he believes there should be a more equitable tax incentive for all donors, not just the rich. And he also believes that philanthropic entities that last forever are a threat to democracy. They need something like term limits, and democratic scrutiny.

Reich makes all of his proposals in this philosophically rich manner with an emphasis on the public vs. private morality of philanthropy, because philanthropic enterprises inevitably play a significant role in our society, committed as it is to liberal democratic values.

Finally, Reich brings to our awareness that the way foundations and philanthropy function today in America is in large part due to the barons of the early 20th century…

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Winners Take All is a scathing critique of the privilege of elites sitting in the driver seat for social change in a system that fundamentally benefits them while leaving others behind.

Anand’s is a critique of how elite generosity sits within the context of neoliberalism. He prefers David Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism, which is helpful: “A theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

The dogma within this system re: social change: the market is the place for world-changing and market type individuals are the ideal world-changers.

The issue here is an extreme emphasis on private solutions to public problems. A few quotes quickly summarize the key issue.

“For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is–above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations” (8).

“These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the system that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform” (30).

“What winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in–think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them” (52).

“The idea of doing well for yourself by doing good for others is a gospel, one that is celebrated and reevangelized at an unending chain revivals around the world. The citizens of MarketWorld can reinforce the mission at conference after conference: Davos, TED, Sun Valley, Aspen, Bilderberg, Dialog, South by Southwest, Burning Man, TechCrunch Disrupt, the Consumer Electronics Show, and even Summit at Sea, on a cruise ship full of entrepreneurs wishing to change the world” (60).

Anand is a fantastic writer. I could quote from him at length. He does offer a critique of the McKinsey way in the middle of his book that readers probably should turn also on Anand himself, since he is a former McKinsey analyst. Essentially, Anand has been trained in a set of protocols that may themselves undermine some aspects of his own argumentation. On the other hand, his transparency about precisely the system that formed his is refreshing.

Midway through the book, Ananda summarizes the work of an essential essay by Porter and Kramer published in the Harvard Business Review titled “Creating Shared Value.”

Anand highlights three key points. First, corporations have pursued a vision of globalization in which they owe nothing to any community.

Think here of how Amazon pays zero in tax, or how Walmart expanded across the country while directly harming downtown communities in adverse ways.

Second, corporations have been focused on “optimization.” We see this on factory floors across our area, where every area of production is optimized, and since optimization is the highest value, the result is frequently mistreatment of workers, and stagnating wage for the working class.

Finally, companies now run more and more for the sake of shareholders rather than for workers or customers or anybody else. This is rampant today, as the pundits keep emphasizing how healthy our economy is because the Dow Industrial Average is up. Who cares if the products are terrible, or how workers are treated. Shareholders are happy!

All of protocols for business success have laundered money to the top tier, the wealthiest, who then engage in philanthropy. Anand concludes, “The new philanthropy not only laundered cruelly earned money but also converted it into influence over a democratic society” (page 159)

Perhaps one of the greatest champions of this new spirit is our famous Arkansas politician, Bill Clinton.

Anand commenting on a Clinton hosted CGI: “One could forget, watching such a civilized group, that traditional politics is argumentative for a reason. It isn’t that politicians don’t know how to be nice, but rather that politics is rooted in the idea of a big, motley people taking their fate into their own hands. Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incompatible interests and coming up with a decent plan, designed to be liked but difficult to love. It solves problems in a context in which everyone is invited to the table and everyone is equal and everyone has the right to complain about being unserved and unseen. Politics, in bringing together people of divergent interests, necessarily puts sacrifice on the table. It is easier to conjure win-wins in forums like [Clinton’s,] where everyone is a winner. The consensus was a reminder of all the kinds of people and perspectives that had not been invited in” (220).

It’s almost as if few see this anymore, as if we can’t see the various ways privatization is eroding our public, democratic processes. Yet it is, and quickly.

The private to public refocus: “When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality: the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient. When a society solves a problem politically and systematically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen. “You are a individual,” she said. “You can’t speak in their name. I can maybe speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children.” (262)

Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

Edgar Villanueva’s book begins with a foreword from, of all people, Peter Buffett. Yes, son of THAT Buffett. He writes, summarizing what he learned as he began the work of distributing funds charitably according to his choosing:

“The more we heard, the more we realized that the rooms full of wealthy and powerful white men could not possess the wisdom we sought. Far too often, they were searching for answers with their right hand to problems that they had created or contributed to with their left. Those who had benefited most from the system of wealth consolidation were see as the experts and the saviors of those who had been exploited and harmed by it.”

Villanueva’s book in the first half is a simply autobiographical account of how he journeyed into the heart of philanthropy as a Native American. It’s an intriguing exposition, especially in the chapter when he outs some of the internal racism built into the philanthropic organization for which he worked.

The second half of the book is a set of steps for healing. He suggests that the wealthy and philanthropic organizations are only going to decolonize wealth if they:

1. Grieve: Stop and feel the hurts we’ve endured.
2. Apologize: Apologize for the hurts we’ve caused.
3. Listen: Acknowledge the wisdom of those excluded and exploited by the system, who possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it.
4. Relate: Share our whole selves with each other and understand we don’t have to agree in order to respect each other.
5. Represent: Build whole new decision-making tables, rather than setting token places at the colonial tables as an afterthought.
6. Invest: Put ALL our money where our values are.
7. Repair: Use money to heal where people are hurting, and stop hurt from happening.

Just think, for example, if the Waltons and Betsy Davos would follow these sets of guidelines before continuing to chase down their charter school proposals.

Villanueva writs, “My central argument is that what ails philanthropy at its core is colonialism. Almost without exception, funders reinforce the colonial division of Us vs. Them, Haves vs. Have Nots, and mostly white saviors and white experts vs. poor, needy, urban, disadvantaged, marginalized, at-risk people (take our pick of euphemisms for people of color). The statistics speak for themselves: 92 percent of foundation CEOs are white, 89 percent of foundation boards are white, while only 7 to 8 percent of foundation funding goes specifically to people of color. Philanthropy is the savior mentality in institutional form, which instead of helping–its ostentatiously proclaimed intent–actually further divides and destabilizes society.

—

“Having the resources to practice such beneficence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the most part, a result of certain human beings being favored through the injustice of government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man’s help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserved to be called beneficence at all?” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals)