Giving with one hand to take back with the other
May 27, 2018 3:20 AM Subscribe
The host of one of the political podcasts I listen to, Light Treason News, often remarks that it's terrifying that we hope for "benevolent" billionaires to be our side to combat the evil ones.
posted by Kitteh at 6:20 AM on May 27, 2018 [22 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:20 AM on May 27, 2018 [22 favorites]
Charitable activity permits CEOs to be philanthropic rather than economically progressive or politically democratic.
That's the crux of the issue right there--it's essentially a PR move, even if those who are acting as philanthropists don't explicitly think of it that way (although I'm sure a lot do). If your continued wealth is based on exploitation and rent-seeking, what good is it that you give a lot of it away?
posted by Ickster at 7:19 AM on May 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
That's the crux of the issue right there--it's essentially a PR move, even if those who are acting as philanthropists don't explicitly think of it that way (although I'm sure a lot do). If your continued wealth is based on exploitation and rent-seeking, what good is it that you give a lot of it away?
posted by Ickster at 7:19 AM on May 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
Essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class.
Neoliberalism in action.
posted by doctornemo at 7:42 AM on May 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Neoliberalism in action.
posted by doctornemo at 7:42 AM on May 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Apparently William Randolph Hearst thought this way too. He bought up lots of art from Europe during his travels and brought it back to the US, expressly because "most people in the US aren't able to travel and see this so I'll it back stateside so more people can."
However, he didn't really do much in the way of giving people access once he brought it back here - it mostly went to decorating Hearst Castle. It also didn't improve his image or stop him from being a dick business wise.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:24 AM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
However, he didn't really do much in the way of giving people access once he brought it back here - it mostly went to decorating Hearst Castle. It also didn't improve his image or stop him from being a dick business wise.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:24 AM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
As historian Mikkel Thorup explains, philanthrocapitalism rests on the claim that “capitalist mechanisms are superior to all others (especially the state) when it comes to not only creating economic but also human progress, and that the market and market actors are or should be made the prime creators of the good society”.It's interesting that philanthrocapitalism and Universal Basic Income both came out of the idea that markets work better than government, but came to such divergent conclusions.
UBI: The market distributes goods better than government can, so we should give money directly to people and let them spend it freely in the market however they'd like.
Philanthrocapitalism: The market hands out rewards to people doing useful things more fairly than government can, so we should let the people who've proven they're best at doing useful things hand out the most money.
That's the market theory behind philanthrocapitalism. I wonder how many true believers it has, who don't see it as the thinnest of justifications for massaging the egos of the rich, letting them play "big man".
posted by clawsoon at 9:32 AM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Philanthropy is subsidized oligarchy.
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 11:14 AM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 11:14 AM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
That's not charity either, David. Charity is when you do something for people when other people are watching.
I'm regularly amazed at how things we spend pages and pages discussing in detail were being explained in two sentences as jokes twenty years ago on Mr. Show.
The entire problem with "charity" summed up. The most giving people I know are the ones with the absolute least, mostly because they know what it is to suffer.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:16 AM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]
I'm regularly amazed at how things we spend pages and pages discussing in detail were being explained in two sentences as jokes twenty years ago on Mr. Show.
The entire problem with "charity" summed up. The most giving people I know are the ones with the absolute least, mostly because they know what it is to suffer.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:16 AM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]
The Givers, a book published last year, goes into great detail on this subject.
In the opening pages, author David Callahan points out that “In many ways, today’s new philanthropy is exciting and inspiring. In other ways, it’s scary and feels profoundly undemocratic.” Later, he notes that “Cheerleaders for philanthropy see nearly everything the givers do as positive, while critics can be just as myopic and, at times, paranoid. [It all constitutes] a trend that is profoundly exciting and inspiring – but also very scary if you’re worried about civic equality in the world’s oldest democracy.”
“My own interest,” he writes, “is in the growing questions around the power of philanthropists to shape America. Just how much influence are the givers wielding these days, and to what ends? How should we feel about that clout here in the world’s oldest democracy? [Philanthropy,] in some areas, is set to surpass government in its ability to shape society’s agenda. To put things differently, we face a future in which private donors – who are accountable to no one – may often wield more influence than elected public officials, who (in theory, anyway) are accountable to all of us... This power shift is one of the biggest stories of our time. Yet it’s a hard one to tell properly for several reasons. Just figuring out what philanthropists are up to is no easy thing. Many funders... don’t reveal much about their giving, and nonprofit laws allow rivers of money to sluice through society in opaque ways… At the same time, influence is a tough subject to get a handle on. [Philanthropists] often operate subtly, working behind the scenes [and even] as they emerge as the new social engineers of our time, their fingerprints can be hard to see.”
posted by LeLiLo at 11:36 AM on May 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
In the opening pages, author David Callahan points out that “In many ways, today’s new philanthropy is exciting and inspiring. In other ways, it’s scary and feels profoundly undemocratic.” Later, he notes that “Cheerleaders for philanthropy see nearly everything the givers do as positive, while critics can be just as myopic and, at times, paranoid. [It all constitutes] a trend that is profoundly exciting and inspiring – but also very scary if you’re worried about civic equality in the world’s oldest democracy.”
“My own interest,” he writes, “is in the growing questions around the power of philanthropists to shape America. Just how much influence are the givers wielding these days, and to what ends? How should we feel about that clout here in the world’s oldest democracy? [Philanthropy,] in some areas, is set to surpass government in its ability to shape society’s agenda. To put things differently, we face a future in which private donors – who are accountable to no one – may often wield more influence than elected public officials, who (in theory, anyway) are accountable to all of us... This power shift is one of the biggest stories of our time. Yet it’s a hard one to tell properly for several reasons. Just figuring out what philanthropists are up to is no easy thing. Many funders... don’t reveal much about their giving, and nonprofit laws allow rivers of money to sluice through society in opaque ways… At the same time, influence is a tough subject to get a handle on. [Philanthropists] often operate subtly, working behind the scenes [and even] as they emerge as the new social engineers of our time, their fingerprints can be hard to see.”
posted by LeLiLo at 11:36 AM on May 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Or you could, you know, just pay taxes or something.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:07 PM on May 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:07 PM on May 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
I haven't seen much press around this at all but the Zucks donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital. This is the public hospital where the homeless and uninsured go to the ER for care. It's now the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. I imagine there are fewer homeless and uninsured who can afford to be in the Bay Area now, but I'm still impressed by this gift.
Compare it to local CEO Tim Boyle (Columbia) who last winter raised a stink about how the city of Portland, OR needs to hire more police because the homeless people in the city are "traumatizing" his employees. He must have received a ton of pushback and angry emails - including mine - because he announced a couple months ago that he's donating $1.5M to Portland for a 150-bed shelter. It feels like a drop in a really big bucket.
Charity is when you do something for people when other people are watching. Indeed!
posted by bendy at 1:38 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
Compare it to local CEO Tim Boyle (Columbia) who last winter raised a stink about how the city of Portland, OR needs to hire more police because the homeless people in the city are "traumatizing" his employees. He must have received a ton of pushback and angry emails - including mine - because he announced a couple months ago that he's donating $1.5M to Portland for a 150-bed shelter. It feels like a drop in a really big bucket.
Charity is when you do something for people when other people are watching. Indeed!
posted by bendy at 1:38 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
The only thing worse than having charitable billionaires is not having charitable billionaires.
posted by CynicalKnight at 2:02 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by CynicalKnight at 2:02 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
A truly excellent book on this topic is Linsey McGoey's No Such Thing As A Free Gift (reviewed by the Guardian here).
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:33 PM on May 27, 2018
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:33 PM on May 27, 2018
the Zucks donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital.
If the Zucks truly cared about helping the patients at the hospital and improving the morale of hospital staff, they would not have insisted on renaming the hospital.
1) Nurses say patients at a San Francisco hospital renamed in 2015 for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife fear for their privacy given recent data breaches and security scandals on the social media platform.
If the Zucks truly cared about helping the patients at the hospital and improving the morale of hospital staff, they would not have insisted on renaming the hospital.
1) Nurses say patients at a San Francisco hospital renamed in 2015 for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife fear for their privacy given recent data breaches and security scandals on the social media platform.
“I know people who go to the doctor and they're afraid to tell the doctor what's going on because they don't know who is going to get that information," nurse Sasha Cuttler told KGO.2) The nurses are also worried that Facebook might use Zuckerberg's relationship with the hospital to try to obtain data on its patients. They pointed to a CNBC report (below) about how Facebook quietly tried to pursue data-sharing arrangements with other hospitals.
...
“We are in charge of keeping our most vulnerable people private and protected,” Heather Ali, a nursing administration employee, told the publication “Now people wonder, ‘How much is my privacy protected at a hospital with that name on it?’ ”
The name change has aroused opposition since it was first announced. A union that includes nursing employees from the hospital circulated a petition in 2015 urging the hospital allow city residents to have some say in the name.3) CNBC report:
Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how Facebook and others collect and use detailed information about Facebook users.posted by cynical pinnacle at 4:00 PM on May 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
"This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone's data," a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.
But as recently as last month, the company was talking to several health organizations, including Stanford Medical School and American College of Cardiology, about signing the data-sharing agreement.
...
Facebook's pitch, according to two people who heard it and one who is familiar with the project, was to combine what a health system knows about its patients (such as: person has heart disease, is age 50, takes 2 medications and made 3 trips to the hospital this year) with what Facebook knows (such as: user is age 50, married with 3 kids, English isn't a primary language, actively engages with the community by sending a lot of messages).
...
The issue of patient consent did not come up in the early discussions, one of the people said. Critics have attacked Facebook in the past for doing research on users without their permission. Notably, in 2014, Facebook manipulated hundreds of thousands of people's news feeds to study whether certain types of content made people happier or sadder. Facebook later apologized for the study.
Health policy experts say that this health initiative would be problematic if Facebook did not think through the privacy implications.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that he preferred public taxation to provide social services rather than private philanthropy, as a society should not be subject to the whims of the philanthropist and should instead ensure that social services were universally delivered.
I cannot locate the quote quickly (I know it was in one of his prefaces to one of his published plays) but something like, "I would rather be taxed as then all will receive the services that they require delivered by the state, than be a philanthropist and entrench inequality."
If you live in a civil society, taxation not charity should provide the services that matter - education, housing, health and welfare.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 7:35 PM on May 27, 2018 [18 favorites]
I cannot locate the quote quickly (I know it was in one of his prefaces to one of his published plays) but something like, "I would rather be taxed as then all will receive the services that they require delivered by the state, than be a philanthropist and entrench inequality."
If you live in a civil society, taxation not charity should provide the services that matter - education, housing, health and welfare.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 7:35 PM on May 27, 2018 [18 favorites]
cynical pinnacle (eponysterical BTW). I totally hear what you're saying. I hadn't known that the Zucks had insisted on the hospital being renamed but that's not uncommon for people who make large donations to colleges for example.
In my experience - I've worked with homeless people, spent time in the ER with homeless people, talked to them on the street about addiction, availability of food, selling street roots newspaper, cold weather shelters being unavailable and general quality of life. Well, there's a saying that beggars can't be choosers and in this fucked up country we live in there are a lot of people who can't afford to see a regular doctor and rely on the ER as their sole source of healthcare.
As much as it sucks for us to have our lives examined by FB, for a lot of people they only get to the hospital - ie the ER - when their leg needs to be amputated because of untreated diabetes or when an infection gets so bad that they walk into the ER and the admitting nurse says "I hope we have a bed for you." (I spent Christmas day with that guy waiting for him to be admitted.)
As far as I know SF General remains the one place in the city that people without the means to pay can get real health care. It's a shitty trade-off but perspective is important.
posted by bendy at 11:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
In my experience - I've worked with homeless people, spent time in the ER with homeless people, talked to them on the street about addiction, availability of food, selling street roots newspaper, cold weather shelters being unavailable and general quality of life. Well, there's a saying that beggars can't be choosers and in this fucked up country we live in there are a lot of people who can't afford to see a regular doctor and rely on the ER as their sole source of healthcare.
As much as it sucks for us to have our lives examined by FB, for a lot of people they only get to the hospital - ie the ER - when their leg needs to be amputated because of untreated diabetes or when an infection gets so bad that they walk into the ER and the admitting nurse says "I hope we have a bed for you." (I spent Christmas day with that guy waiting for him to be admitted.)
As far as I know SF General remains the one place in the city that people without the means to pay can get real health care. It's a shitty trade-off but perspective is important.
posted by bendy at 11:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
"Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."
Summary of Clement Attlee's "The Social Worker", 1920.
"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it."
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
Quotes are to make the point that the exact forms have changed slightly but this is real 19th century stuff. You can go back to the 19th century and if you do a find and replace of criticisms of Carnegie with Zuckerberg it's not an exact fit but it's pretty close. The 19th century extremes of wealth and despair are not problematic for the super-rich - they are a goal. A huge pool of desperate labour that can be had for nearly nothing, and pick out some "deserving poor" to give to for salving your religious conscience in the 19th century or smoothing your corporate image in the 21st century (and at both times, as pointed out by Marx, attempting to defuse incipient revolution).
posted by Vortisaur at 2:09 AM on May 28, 2018 [15 favorites]
Summary of Clement Attlee's "The Social Worker", 1920.
"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it."
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
Quotes are to make the point that the exact forms have changed slightly but this is real 19th century stuff. You can go back to the 19th century and if you do a find and replace of criticisms of Carnegie with Zuckerberg it's not an exact fit but it's pretty close. The 19th century extremes of wealth and despair are not problematic for the super-rich - they are a goal. A huge pool of desperate labour that can be had for nearly nothing, and pick out some "deserving poor" to give to for salving your religious conscience in the 19th century or smoothing your corporate image in the 21st century (and at both times, as pointed out by Marx, attempting to defuse incipient revolution).
posted by Vortisaur at 2:09 AM on May 28, 2018 [15 favorites]
The problem I have with the societal emphasis on charity from the rich is that everyone else must beg.
posted by srboisvert at 4:18 AM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 4:18 AM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
>The host of one of the political podcasts I listen to, Light Treason News, often remarks that it's terrifying that we >hope for "benevolent" billionaires to be our side to combat the evil ones.
I am strangely reminded of the various attempts at Irish independence over the centuries. Many songs cast either Spain or France as saviours, who would sail to Ireland to help free the subjugated Irish. Hoping for Bonaparte to come and save you from the English is kind of like hopping from the frying pan into the fire.
posted by LN at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
I am strangely reminded of the various attempts at Irish independence over the centuries. Many songs cast either Spain or France as saviours, who would sail to Ireland to help free the subjugated Irish. Hoping for Bonaparte to come and save you from the English is kind of like hopping from the frying pan into the fire.
posted by LN at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
I feel like the fact that no billionaire has bothered to fix Flint's water is pretty solid evidence that philanthropy is bullshit.
posted by speicus at 9:24 AM on May 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by speicus at 9:24 AM on May 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
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The rich are not your friends, and they don't care about us.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:02 AM on May 27, 2018 [34 favorites]