TWO APPROACHES TO EFFECTIVE PHILANTHROPY

Much of the scholarly focus on effective philanthropy has been on so-called philanthrocapitalism (Goss Reference Goss2016; Reckhow Reference Reckhow2016; Reich Reference Reich2016), which Bishop and Green (2008, 6) described as using business-like strategies to harness “the profit motive to achieve social good.” Philanthrocapitalists including Bill and Melinda Gates, George Soros, and Eli Broad are widely praised for their generosity and efforts to “save the world” through large-scale, metrics-driven programs in health, education, and other areas (Bishop and Green Reference Bishop and Green2008). Whereas scholars point out the similarities of the philanthrocapitalist approach to earlier philanthropists (Tumber Reference Tumber2015), McGoey (2015, 19) suggested that what is new today is the scale and explicitness of their efforts—including that an increasing number of “powerful donors admit and even champion the fact that gift-giving is a useful vehicle for preserving privilege.” That is, neoliberal ideology has pervaded social discourse to such a degree that most celebrate and only a rare few question the actions of philanthrocapitalists who assume that there is no conflict between making money and making change (Edwards Reference Edwards2015).

Effective altruists similarly focus on applying “evidence and reason” to determine “the most effective ways to improve the world” (Singer Reference Singer2015a, 11). Effective altruism is praised because, as Rubenstein (2015, 2) wrote: “It urges donors to make empirically informed decisions that focus on effects rather than good intentions, ‘warm-glow’ feelings, or the intrinsic value of actions.” Schambra (2014, 1) described effective altruism as “a radical utilitarian approach to giving.”

The original and most vocal advocate for this approach, ethicist Peter Singer (Reference Singer2009), argued that we should give much more to help the poor and, in his latest book (Singer Reference Singer2015b), that “doing the most good” requires worthy recipients of support who must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with money or time than other options. For many effective altruists, organizations can best demonstrate such effectiveness through randomized controlled trial (RCT) field experiments: “the new gold standard in development economics” (Clough Reference Clough2015, 2). In this domain, MacAskill (2015b, 35) proposed that “good” can be understood in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), which measure lives saved or lives improved. It “combines these two benefits into one metric, using survey data about the trade-offs people are willing to make in order to assess how bad different sorts of illnesses or disabilities are.” For example, “A year of life for a blind person is worth 0.4 QALYs; a year of life as a non-blind, otherwise healthy person is worth 1 QALY” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2015, 3). QALYs then allow a funder to compare lives improved or saved across a broad swath of areas, such as comparing treatment to a visually impaired person, to someone with HIV/AIDS, or to someone at risk of parasitic-worm infection. Based on this comparison, MacAskill (2015b, 23) argued that funding can go 100 times farther in a developing or poor country than in a wealthy one, so this is where one should give.

Philanthrocapitalism and effective altruism are similar in their focus on using metrics to gauge effectiveness; however, philanthrocapitalists use metrics primarily to select a group once a cause has been chosen, whereas effective altruists believe that metrics “should be the basis for choosing which cause to support in the first place” (Schambra Reference Schambra2014, 3, emphasis in original). In other words, whereas philanthrocapitalists preserve the idea of donor discretion and that all causes are in some sense equally valued—making no distinction between good and bad areas of giving—effective altruists believe that some causes are more important than others, that there are good and bad areas of giving. Thus, giving to the local baseball team or to support a personal passion or interest is not as good as giving to the Against Malaria Foundation, which has been shown to be highly effective at saving lives per dollar spent.

Effective altruists also differ from philanthrocapitalists in that they typically are not wealthy individuals (the movement is especially popular among Millennials; Singer Reference Singer2015a) and seem less interested in profiting from gift giving. Effective altruists, nevertheless, see little conflict between making money and making change (MacAskill Reference MacAskill2015b; Singer Reference Singer2015b). Whereas philanthrocapitalists’ tag line might be “doing well by doing good,” effective altruists’ tagline might be “doing well to do good.” Effective altruism’s advocates go so far as to advise students to consider becoming investment bankers rather than social workers or schoolteachers because, by their calculation, this would enable them to make more money to give more to do more good (MacAskill Reference MacAskill2015b; Singer Reference Singer2015b). ^{Footnote 1} Philanthrocapitalism and effective altruism exemplify the extreme degree to which philanthropy increasingly aligns with a neoliberal ideology, in which individuals in need become exchangeable QALY widgets, reliant on performance-focused donors for their survival, and in which investment bankers are held up as “the new heroes” (Malone et al. Reference Malone, Grove, Byker, Wilson, Cohen, Stuart and Shenk2005).

EFFECTIVE PHILANTHROPY IN THE NEOLIBERAL, VOLUNTARY STATE

Those who critique philanthrocapitalism and effective altruism raise concerns that are similar to critiques of philanthropy raised in the past about lack of accountability and having an outsized influence on public and social policy; how their actions lead to an erosion of support for governmental programs; and how their strategies might exacerbate the same social and economic inequalities that philanthropists purport to remedy. These concerns may assume even greater relevance in the neoliberal, voluntary state.

As with earlier forms of philanthropy, philanthrocapitalists and effective altruists are criticized for a lack of accountability. Philanthrocapitalists have no economic or electoral accountability or transparency obligations (Reich Reference Reich2016). Philanthrocapitalists enjoy vast amounts of wealth and can have substantial influence on areas such as health and education policy (Reckhow Reference Reckhow2016), whereas the public has little recourse when it does not like the philanthropists’ approach. McGoey (2015, 8), for example, pointed out how problematic it is that the Gates Foundation provides 10% of the World Health Organization’s overall budget and is the largest single donor to the United Nations Health Agency (donating more than the US government) but is only accountable to its three trustees: Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffett. Likewise, effective altruists, by focusing on measures such as QALYs and giving to distant poor countries, are “freed from entanglement in the messy reality of any particular community….There is no need ever to encounter face-to-face the unintended consequences generated by…interventions” (Schambra Reference Schambra2014, 5). This creates what Tumber (2015, 5) called an ethical system of distant, unaccountable administrators in which “the suffering are units to be managed effectively….”

In the effective-philanthropy equation, poor people are treated as voiceless victims of a preventable evil, who can be saved by a (comparatively) wealthy philanthropist (Rubenstein Reference Rubenstein2015; Snow Reference Snow2015). This enables people who have money to give with the power to create social policy (Nickel and Eikenberry Reference Nickel, Eikenberry and Taylor2010). Effective altruists essentially create policy through each gift they make based on deciding who is more worthy of being saved per their selected performance measures. Similarly, philanthrocapitalists can use “their wealth, ideas, and political leverage to advance controversial policy goals” (Goss Reference Goss2016, 442). Both philanthrocapitalists and effective altruists practice what Berger and Penna (Reference Berger and Penna2013) described as “charitable imperialism,” in which donors decide where the money goes and who benefits. Although this may have been always the case with philanthropy to some degree, with a weakened role for government and the erosion of public institutions, effective philanthropists have even greater authority over who benefits and how.

Another major concern is that philanthropy channels private funds toward nonprofit/nongovernmental organization (NGO) services, further eroding support for governmental spending. McGoey (Reference McGoey2015) described how the creation of private secondary and elementary schools, created through a collaboration of the three powerful “meta-foundations”—the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation—and run on a for-profit basis, led to the erosion of support for public schools. Reckhow (Reference Reckhow2016) also showed the degree to which philanthrocapitalists have expanded their focus on national education policy advocacy, including support for the growth of charter schools. As with other philanthropy, this advocacy work by effective philanthropists is subsidized through tax incentives, which means that funds that would have gone into public coffers are diverted to remain in the control of philanthrocapitalists or effective altruists (Reich Reference Reich2016).

In the developing world, Clough (Reference Clough2015) argued that NGOs are not necessarily the best at helping the poorest; rather, they often are more likely to help the “middle poor” while government welfare programs serve the poorest. Yet, effective altruists have largely ruled out governments as eligible recipients of their aid. They leave unquestioned the assumption that a charitable organization or a social enterprise—not the community, class, or state—is the proper object of their efforts (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2015). Furthermore, effective altruism’s extreme reliance on RCTs means that it captures only a narrow view of the impact, which does not account for any unintended effects of a program, such as demobilizing political pressure on governments to address social issues (Clough Reference Clough2015, 3). Advocates of effective altruism note that whereas most give to organizations identified by charity evaluators (e.g., Give Well) as their top charities, they do so less because they are the most effective and more because they are the organizations with enough data to state anything useful about effectiveness (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2013).

Finally, there is concern about the ways in which philanthrocapitalism and effective altruism enable current conditions to persist. Again, this is not necessarily a new concern but rather is made worse in the neoliberal, voluntary-state context. Many philanthrocapitalists earn their fortune through business or market strategies that exacerbate the same social and economic inequalities that they purport to remedy (McGoey Reference McGoey2015, 8–9). Simultaneously, philanthrocapitalists prioritize market solutions over other types of solutions, and these are typically conceptualized in isolation from the broader political-economic dynamics in which they are located (Bosworth Reference Bosworth2011; Edwards Reference Edwards2010; Jenkins Reference Jenkins2011; Ramdas Reference Ramdas2011; Rogers Reference Rogers2011; Wilson Reference Wilson, Wilson and Swyngedouw2014). That is, there is little questioning that the same system that created problems that need to be addressed should be used as the approach to address these problems (see a similar argument about consumption philanthropy in Nickel and Eikenberry Reference Nickel and Eikenberry2009). In fact, it seems effective philanthropists believe quite the opposite—that is, doing well is equated with doing good.

Effective altruism also does little to question or address the system that created the conditions for lives needing to be saved, and it may even harm “the poor by being sub-optimal and standing in the way of the more effective and lasting poverty relief brought about by changes in the political and economic system” (Wichmann and Petersen Reference Wichmann and Petersen2013). Tumber (2015, 2) rightly noted that “modern global poverty…emerged from a series of violent historical maneuvers…through the colonial seizure of land, political power, culture, and hard-won skill, which continues today by means of neoliberal trade policies that primarily benefit the financial sector.” Yet, effective altruists apparently ignore all of this, abstracting from—and thereby exonerating—“the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms” (Snow Reference Snow2015, 4). Neither Singer nor MacAskill, or other effective altruists, seem to want to challenge the world and its neoliberal ideology as it is. Indeed, by advocating that earning to give may be the best way to make the world better, they “acknowledge how important it is that the wheels of the capitalist economy keep turning” (Baggini Reference Baggini2015, 49).

Some effective altruists have challenged this critique. Wiblin (2015, 29) in particular claimed that “effective altruists love systemic change,” listing their support of funding for immigration, criminal justice, and other reforms. However, in the same blog post, Wiblin wrote: “Effective altruists are usually not radicals or revolutionaries….I personally favor maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies, though some of my friends and colleagues hope we can one day do much better.” McMahan (2012, 4) also made the point that not every donor can or should be devoted to bringing about institutional changes through political action: “To suppose that the only acceptable option is to work to reform global economic institutions and that it is self-indulgent to make incremental contributions to the amelioration of poverty through individual action is rather like condemning a doctor who treats the victims of a war for failing to devote his efforts instead to eliminating the root causes of war.” However, both approaches seem to assume that effectiveness should be the primary focus of philanthropy, but the insistence on short-term, specific, and measurable results can come at the cost of longer-term and larger social outcomes (Katz Reference Katz2005, 130; McGoey Reference McGoey2015).

CONCLUSION AND ALTERNATIVES TO EFFECTIVE PHILANTHROPY

Compared to other earlier forms of philanthropy, we show herein that effective philanthropy may have an even greater effect on social policy, influencing who decides on and provides social services, as well as the number, degree, and type of services provided. By focusing on effectiveness, people with the resources to give—who benefit from the current system as it is—gain further authority to decide who benefits and to prescribe the mechanisms by which effectiveness is judged and implemented. The emphasis on performance leads to enacting a disciplinary logic of governing mentalities, enabling the power of philanthropists to further grow (Schram et al. Reference Schram, Soss, Houser and Fording2015, 746). Effective philanthropy provides less room to challenge the status quo and fails to represent the need for social change that exists outside of the neoliberal project. This ideology has become so ingrained in our everyday lives to the point that we barely notice its effect on our assumptions and discourse.

Philanthropists and advocates might look to counter discourses and strategies. One possibility is a more conservative approach advocated by Beer (Reference Beer2015) and Schambra (Reference Schambra2014), to go back to traditional understandings of charity or philanthropy as promoting human flourishing and civic life in local communities by reinvigorating and growing local relationships of care and love. Beer called this “philanthrolocalism.” It encourages community embeddedness and face-to-face encounters with others, in line with an Aristotelian view of philanthropy (Gunderman Reference Gunderman, Sargeant and Shang2010) and a Tocquevillian view of democratic self-government (Schambra Reference Schambra2014). Alternatively, Clough (2015) suggested redirecting substantial philanthropic funding toward advocacy organizations that specifically work to strengthen the accountability of the state sector. This is more in line with a progressive view of social-justice philanthropy that not only gives voice to those who suffer (Nickel and Eikenberry Reference Nickel and Eikenberry2009, 984) but also aims to work for structural change and to redistribute social, political, and economic power. Both challenge the premises of neoliberalism such as individual self-interest and economic calculus as primary guides to governance.