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Philanthropy

Postby Hennessy on Wed Oct 27, 2010 8:44 pm

Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to schools in Newark:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 6hQUjkIb1A

Bill Gates is giving away pretty much his entire fortune:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx

Back at the end of the 19th century when Carnegie gave away something like $350 million (which in purchasing power and adjusted for inflation is a lot more than it sounds) there were accusations of the rich trying to "buy their way into heaven".
The rich have always given to the poor, charity is always a good thing. It's practically a rule in Western society that you can be as mean, grasping and conniving as you like making your fortune but if you give it away you can be redeemed. I blame the Christians for that. Charities support whole sections of society like cancer sufferers and the mentally disabled, David Cameron even wants their work to expand to cover the fact the state isn't going to always be able to afford caring for everyone someday soon.

There are thousands of charities in the UK, some have been around for a hundred years or more. Let's put aside the work these charities have done to tide over problems in society, have they actually changed anything? The Salvation Army do roughly the same job they did in 1865 when they were set up, as do many other organisations. Take UNICEF UK for example. Raised £65 million last year, £50 million of which went to active causes ( http://www.unicef.org.uk/pages.asp?page=49). Red Nose Day had raised £80 million 4 months after it finished (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Relief#2009_Event), even the doughty Salvation Army raised a respectable £29 million (http://www.charitiesdirect.com/charitie ... 00566.html). Year after year after year, for 150 years the Salvation Army has had little old ladies out in the streets banging their little pots. What's £29 million a year for 150 years? Just shy of 4.4 billion. Some years might have been better than others though and it probably took a while to get off the ground so lets call it £4 billion. That's just in the UK. Worldwide they have operating costs of £2.6 billion a year alone.

Anyway this £4 billion is a bit spurious but we'll run with it for now. It's a small sum compared to the figures bandied around each day by the government, but it's enough to give every single person in the UK £65 today. Each year in the UK alone around £10 billion is given by private individuals to charity (http://www.cafonline.org/pdf/UK_Giving_2009.pdf). That's two and a half times what the poor old SA has earned in its entire lifetime, and even that figure is absolutely dwarfed by the figures from the US. $600 billion given to charity in 2008 and 2009 (http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu/News/ ... 102009.pdf). That's almost the entire UK budget for a year. You could happily run the entire NHS, hospitals, staff, drugs off $600 for 3 years and have money left over.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if worldwide figures were available they'd show charity each year is probably in excess of $trillion at least. That's just from private individuals. That's a lot of money, and it doesn't seem to have solved anything. Essentially we are still living in a world that requires charity on top of taxation each year and it's achieved...nothing? Is Africa still mostly backward? Yes. Are there still unassailable social problems in most Western societies such as drug addiction, homelessness and domestic abuse? Yes. Children still beaten and raped? Yes. Despite the philanthropy of the state combined with individual charities and huge sums each year, we are still mostly doing what Carnegie was doing, and that is throwing money at problems and then sitting comfortably back until next year. At least Carnegie put his money into institutions that survive today rather than a fluid series of initiatives and projects that diffuse and thereby reduce the impact of the large sums of money put into them. Fair enough we may spend more globally on defense, but the serious money for guns usually trades hands between rich countries anyway, and isn't anything like the constant stream of money that's been poured into Africa and even India in the last 60 years. Money that has usually ended up going back the way it came into Swiss bank accounts and BMW showrooms anyway.

Each year hundreds of heads are shaved, thousands of pub crawls and raffles organised and tens of thousands of marathons run "for charity". Charity that seemingly changes very little, is unaccountable in how it spends its money (the £803,000 given by Comic Relief to Twin, a charity that seems to campaign against free trade or the dear old SA's trouble with misappropriating funds in India) and crucially doesn't pay tax or have to spend its money in one place. If all the charity given in the world was put in the a few places that were the right places massive wastage and replication could be avoided and a lot more done. Targeted charity might stand a chance if it invested in one country in Africa rather than ten. China right now is doing more with business deals and development contracts that could almost be called "colonial" than Western charity has been able to do for 50 years.

That's one answer. It won't work though. There is too much tied up in there being a charity for this and that, answering each and every problem. There are charities for the care of the animals of abused families - that's right - the pets of victims of domestic abuse (http://www.pawsforkids.org.uk/) and charities that save street prostitutes in Bangladesh. Worthy causes of course (well maybe not so much the former). But can any of it be solved or will Paws for Kids be celebrating it's 150th in 2160? Here's my answer. Next time someone asks me for money "for charity" and I consider it I'm going to say "no" and put that money towards the Space Elevator instead. Why? Because charity didn't help anyone during the Industrial Revolution, why are we so certain it helps now?

EDITED amended Zuckerberg's name 2203 27/10/10
The Sinner.
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Re: Philanthropy

Postby jollytiddlywink on Thu Oct 28, 2010 9:26 pm

Phew. Its been a while since I read anything that gloomy, and I say that as a historian who spends a great deal of his time inhabiting the first half of the twentieth century.

I do agree with your opening thoughts that rich people are more or less forgiven for whatever sins they commit on the way up by virtue of giving so much of it away afterward. I'm not going to defend this, per se, but I would point out that Ranke, a great historian, held as a central premise that "every generation is equidistant from eternity" by which he meant that we are not to pass judgments based on current views, but rather to accept the past on the terms we find it in. Taken differently, we arrive at an understanding that no generation has any claim to precedence over any other generation. What we might take from that is an argument that amassing a fortune by means we find cut-throat and irresponsible today was not necessarily seen in that light then. In any case, there are plenty of people making money today in ways that current society deems positively abhorrent, but that still continues. It would be sensible to put our own house in order before we point fingers at ghosts.
And then we have a terribly awkward question to ask: if a person makes a fortune (legally, and more or less within the ethics of the time), and the proceeds of that person's charity benefit the next six or seven generations, where do we place the moral balance? To take Carnegie, your example: almost every place in Scotland of any size has a Carnegie Hall, and to this day the proceeds of his charity provide money to a host of causes, including scholarships for Scottish students.

Your question about whether charity is worthwhile, about whether we should bother if it doesn't seem to solve anything, rather than just palliate it, is another difficult one.
I'll put my neck out and say yes. Charity is worthwhile. Some problems it does solve. Some problems it does not solve. And I would argue for the importance of charity even if it never solved any problems at all, but merely made things better for today.
Some problems will probably never be solved. Poverty will never go away. To be sure, today's definition of poverty is radically different to what it was even 70 years ago. It is only 12 generations ago (give or take) that people starved to death in Britain in hard times. Even in good times, to be poor then was a grinding, miserable existence, eked out on the very margins of society, and the very margins of life itself. Today, whatever else might be said (and a lot, alas, could be said), I think that Britain can offer some form of housing to anyone who wants it, and nobody in Britain starves.

And to step back from your argument about the uselessness of charity, it seems to be predicated on a profound pessimism about progress. I share your skepticism. A firm belief in 'progress' will not long survive exposure to a study of colossal wars, or of fascist governments and holocausts. But those wars ended. The forces of good (and I mean that very literally!) won. To dispute that progress was made between September 1939 and May 1945 is to dispute reality.

If peace and democracy have not broken out worldwide, they have at least broken out across Europe.
If tolerance and human rights haven't broken out worldwide, they have broken out in more places than ever before.

The world is full of problems, and many of them we may never fix. Some of them we are scarcely able to patch up until tomorrow, when they will need patched again. But that doesn't make trying to fix them futile. Accepting that we'll never cure the world need not stop us from a valiant effort.
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Re: Philanthropy

Postby LonelyPilgrim on Mon Nov 01, 2010 12:21 am

Hennessey:

Charity doesn't exist to solve problems. It exists to help people deal with and sometimes overcome them. As such, you can't say that a food charity has failed because there is still hunger. There will probably always be hunger. Their measure of success is in how many hungry people they have fed and who have gone on to have personally meaningful lives that would have been cut short by starvation otherwise. None of your numbers address that, and so you've presented no meaningful metric.

I would argue that the fact that the same charities are around, doing the same sort of work, is not a failure of the charity. Rather, it shows a failure of society, economy, or policy that the same conditions are around which the charity addresses.
Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova
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