Maybe It's Time We Tried Democracy Instead?

jacobin |  The enterprise of big philanthropy ultimately benefits the wealthy a great deal. Though this news is something less than earth shattering, a newly published review of scholarship surrounding elite giving in the United States and UK makes the case with particular force. Jointly authored by four academics based at different universities in Britain, “Elite philanthropy in the United States and United Kingdom in the new age of inequalities” both lends weight to the existing critiques of big philanthropy and offers some useful theoretical foundations for critics moving forward.

Today’s elites practice charitable giving largely for personal benefit and because large-scale giving inevitably yields a kind of soft power. “Elite philanthropy,” the authors write,

is rarely a “pure gift” motivated solely by altruism; rather, it represents a means of converting surplus funds into prized alternative forms of capital. . . . On this analysis, elites are drawn to philanthropy not simply as a means of virtuously “giving back” to society, as is so often claimed, but also as an unimpeachable source of the complementary capitals needed to function effectively in the field of power.

Indeed, visit any hospital, museum, or university today and you’ll inevitably find the names of ultra-wealthy patrons emblazoned somewhere prominent for all to see. Scale this up to the commanding heights of big charity and you ultimately find figures like Bill Gates — who mysteriously increased his wealth by about 60 percent in roughly the decade and a half after pledging to give it all away. Gates’s giving may not have required much generosity on his part, but it certainly yielded big returns for his public reputation and, it would seem, for his own bottom line.

Elite philanthropy, far from being merely an inadequate solution to social problems, ultimately works to entrench and perpetuate them — offering a tiny handful of elites a useful vehicle for the purchase of virtue, and the soft power that comes with it, at the expense of the many.