The Futility and Conspiracy of Philanthropism

If you are bummed that football season is almost over like I am, dwelling on the futility of it all maybe, you should probably avoid Hans Taparia and Bruce  Buchanan's essay on the futility of philanthropy. Their essay will not cheer you up.

The authors make the case that philanthropy can never defeat and may even perpetuate economic misery and exploitation.  The authors don't quite accuse nonprofits of acting as co-conspirators.  But I have often agreed with anarchists and conspiracy theorists who assert that by make misery and exploitation bearable, nonprofits perpetuate the system that generates misery and exploitation.  Government does the same thing too, I think.  It constructs just enough of a safety net so the masses will not rise up and overthrow the winner-take-all market from which very few get very rich and very many get very poor.  If governments and nonprofit organizations stood by and permitted economic losers to feel the full brunt of their inevitable loss -- without government assistance or charity -- enough losers would rise up and overthrow the system that makes losers inevitable.  On a macro level, nonprofits contribute to a harmful economic system by making misery and exploitation tolerable and widely dispersed enough that economic losers will never amass and turn their anger on capitalism.  I might be reading my own bias into  the essay.  Here are excerpts from The Impossible Math of Philanthropy:

Americans typically understand charities as organizations that pick up where the government leaves off — championing the poor, the environment, the sick and the marginalized. But this framing is incomplete, and frankly misleading. More often than not, charities work to mitigate harms caused by business. Every year, corporations externalize trillions in costs to society and the planet. Nonprofits form to absorb those costs, but have at their disposal only a tiny portion of the profits that corporations were able to generate by externalizing those costs in the first place. This is what makes charity such a good deal for businesses and their owners: They can earn moral credit for donating a penny to a problem they made a dollar creating. These calculations reveal why so many good and seemingly well-funded causes fail to move the needle. The health and environmental costs from the food industry exceed the revenue it generates. The cost in the United States of health care from smoking is several times the revenue of the cigarette industry. The costs of mental illness, misinformation and political discord created by the social media industry is immeasurable. Nonprofits that work to reverse obesity, prevent addiction or treat anxiety will never have anywhere near the resources they need to fully meet their missions.

Building a more equitable world would require addressing the damage that for-profit companies cause at the root. As the European Union has shown through a variety of new laws in recent years, regulation can be used to force businesses to internalize their hidden social costs. Alternatively, corporations could be legally rechartered so that their bylaws compel them to put public interests ahead of their shareholders. Both approaches would hurt companies’ profit margins.

For this to work, the public would also need to develop greater skepticism of the rich entrepreneurs who, with more cash than they could ever spend, donate portions of their wealth to favored causes. Lionized for their achievements and revered for their compassion, they bask in their status as society’s saviors. Meanwhile, the corporations they own extract wealth and externalize costs on a scale that dwarfs their largess. With one hand they generate supernormal profits by plundering society, and with the other they dole out a few crumbs to “save the world.” But they never will. The math simply doesn’t work.

darryll k. jones