A former McKinsey consultant and New York Times journalist provides this damming exposure of the duplicity and hypocrisy of his fellow elite American thought leaders and multimillionaires as they claim that their philanthropic generosity is a needed altruistic effort to improve the the lot of those people they shamelessly exploit.
Giridharadas reserves his most withering scorn for the Sackler family, the Carnegie Foundation, tobacco executives, New York bankers and the denizens of Silicon Valley whose mantra is that they can do well by doing good.But none of the attendees at gala conference sites and corporate boardrooms, including the Clinton Global Initiative, escape unscathed. He notes that those CEOs attending meetings at posh resorts including Davos and Aspen, and in Wall Street corporate boardrooms to address the world’s problems never include representatives of the class of people whose problems they are pretending to fix. Poverty is a proper topic to address, but inequality is carefully avoided. Some have taken to “Pinkering” pointing to Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature documenting that we have never had it better, as an excuse to do nothing for the less fortunate.
“It can be disturbing that the most influential power centre ( SiliconValley) of our age is in the habit of denying its power and of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself.”
Entrusting the solution of the world’s myriad problems to the capitalist free-marketers who have created many of the problems through their greed, rather than to democratically elected governments is like putting the criminal suspects in charge of the court system. “The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.”
Sanford Weill of Citigroup is singled out for his hypocrisy in bemoaning the fact that the U.S. government did not have the money to ensure social change, leaving that to the private sector; this after Citigroup received a $45 billion government bailout , having contributed to the problem in the first place by their reckless lending in the subprime mortgage market.
I was surprised that the significant philanthropic contributions of religious organizations is never mentioned. It is not clear to me that private and corporate philanthropy, even if self-serving, should relinquish responsibility for social change to tax-based government action. Many philanthropists and volunteers want to believe that they are making a difference in the world even if it is based largely on self-deception. My wife and I have established a charitable foundation, convincing ourselves that our favourite charity, Doctors Without Borders, is likely to use our money to benefit more people than are our feds.
There is little in the way of concrete suggestions for alternatives to private sector philanthropy here, other than a plea for higher taxes on the rich and more government restrictions to rein in the excesses of the unfettered free market economy. The age-old debate about the proper roles of government and private enterprise in a democratic society is far from resolved here.
This is a well-written carefully researched, enlightening book that will be of most interest to economists and politicians, but should be widely discussed. I enjoyed reading it.
The Passionate Reader 