The Rich Need to Give Better
They’re not doing the best job.
I like reading celebrity gossip now and then. It keeps me alive.
Right from Bennifer’s will they/won’t they divorce (I think they will), to seeing Will Smith’s painful emasculation on Jada Pinkett’s couch when she confessed her ‘entanglement’, I take an unfortunate morbid pleasure in knowing that rich people have weird problems too. (Jada and Will really do need help though.)
But recently, I have been more interested in stories about how the rich give to the poor.
In particular, I want to focus on the truly wealthy. The tech billionaires.
This interest was sparked when my sister-in-law interviewed for the Gates Foundation. She does not-for-profit work and found them to be lacking in many respects. She went through 12 rounds of behavioral, logical, competency, and aptitude-based tests for a mid-tier level position.
12 rounds.
I half expected her next interview to involve jumping through a ring of fire with a piece of celery in her mouth. The sheer time and energy she spent in this entire interview process seemed very wasteful to me.
But through jumping past these hoops, she got to learn plenty about the organization. She spoke to former colleagues who had worked there and was warned to stay away. It seemed resources were scarce, organizational hierarchies were awry, and impending changes were on the horizon. What those changes were are now clear (the divorce), but at the time, they were perceived to be looming, murky, shape-shifting threats that no one could really understand.
Bill Gates takes a very data-driven approach to philanthropy with programs that require funding to have very specific milestones to be hit. Funds could be pulled out if the guidelines weren’t met. I agree with this approach up to a certain point.
Other than the need to know that what you’re doing matters, there does need to be a more business-minded and accountable approach to charity.
But the problem is human suffering cannot only be reduced to numbers. If one more rape becomes a statistic, you start re-creating the very problems you are trying to solve. You have to combine personal stories with data to see what narratives they tell. Are they painting the same picture? If not, that’s your clue that something is wrong.
What better way to give than to ask the people you’re giving if it works? Melinda Gates certainly feels this way. She explains as much in her books where she details visits to Africa and India to visit women and talk to them directly about whether she’s making the impact she thinks she is.
There is such a big difference between Bill and Melinda’s styles that I wonder what becomes of the Gates Foundation after their formal business separation. Will Bill go back to his data-driven approach? Will the personal touch be removed? What intangible effects will this have on their work?
This is why I like more personalized forms of giving.
Ruth Gottesman is an example of a rich person I want to hug.
She is a 93-year-old widow of a wealthy Wall Street financier and decided to give away one billion dollars to a Bronx medical school to make tuition free to all students graduating from that school going forward. Think about that for one second.
Debt-free college students.
The impact is immediate, specific, tangible, and nothing short of awesome. It will have knock-on effects on their lives for years to come.
Ruth inspires me.
Another one I liked was Rob Hale, giving graduating students at Dartmouth 2 envelopes with $1000 each. One to keep and one to give away. This inculcates an attitude of service. A much-needed attitude in these times.
Each of these instances was unique and easy to implement. I have nothing against big ‘corporation-like’ charities, other than the fact that they are run like corporations. They do good work, but it is quite telling that I couldn’t find reliable independently run statistics that measure the efficacy of Gates’ programs other than the annual letter on their official website. And that’s the problem.
When something becomes too big to fail, its eventual failure becomes too big.
