Does Philanthropy Help the Poor? Should it?
Caring for the Needs of Strangers
Peter Singer says that people who give to art museums rather than to poverty alleviation are making a moral mistake. Peter Buffett scolds philanthropic one-percenters for the charitable-industrial complex, philanthropic colonialism, and conscience laundering. Dan Pallotta gives a barn-burning TED talk about the stupidity of evaluating charitable organizations based on overhead expenditures. Pundits debate whether the charitable contribution deduction is a good idea. This summer has seen a flurry of writing in the popular press about philanthropy.
Lagging far behind, alas, is more systematic or academic attention to philanthropy. In tandem with some other university efforts, my colleagues and I at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society are trying to change that.
Late last year, I attended a conference at the New School for Social Research on Giving: Caring for the Needs of Others. It was an eclectic and interesting gathering, including talks by tax lawyers, economists, journalists, religious studies scholars, evolutionary psychologists, nonprofit leaders, and philosophers. The presentations are available online, and a special issue of the journal Social Research on the topic is now out.
My view is that we need to answer two questions. First,does philanthropy actually serve the needs of the poor and disadvantaged? The surprising answer is an unequivocal no.
Second, should philanthropy be directed toward the poor? The answers here are more interesting and more complicated. But to pursue a public debate about this question, we need first to acknowledge that philanthropy is really not much about caring for the needs of strangers.
The nonprofit sector in the United States is wildly permissive, oversight of the sector is lax, and approval of nonprofit status is trivially easy to obtain. The United States has more than 1.3 million public charities, not counting religious organizations, which receive but do not need to file for nonprofit status, and more than 50,000 new public charities have been created every year for the past decade.
Philanthropy appears to be more about the pursuit of one’s own projects, a mechanism for the expression of one’s values or preferences rather than a mechanism for redistribution.
