Against Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

I have been referred a few times by people in the EA community to this blog post, Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy. I am responding to it. Before reading, I highly recommend listening to Episodes 45 and 46 of the Citations Needed podcast, which I refer to regularly throughout this.

Anti-conflict of interest: I have previously worked for and been paid a salary by an "environmental" charity whose funding predominantly came from large private donors (such as Rockefeller, with support from BP, Goldmann Sachs, JP Morgan, Shell International... you get the gist).

1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?

Yes and no. Smokestar codex says that we should criticize (not praise) the extravagant expenditures of billionaires rather than their philanthropic work, as the latter deters them from being charitable in the first place. But plenty of people do criticize their selfish indulgences too. Such criticism just doesn't get the same level of media airtime (will get back to media in a bit).

Additionally there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the hypocrisy of billionaire philanthropy that makes it more criticize-able. If billionaires then choose to take offence at the criticism and stop giving, then that is pure egotism and they obviously don't care enough about the cause they are throwing money at. Otherwise they wouldn't give a shit what people say.

But also no, because there is a better way to protest billionaires having too much power in society. And that is looking at why the rich are rich to start with. As things stand, we are not conditioned to question the origins of their wealth or consider if this crazy global structure could ever change. They're just there to be benefactors of the public good. As Honore de Balzac supposedly once said, "behind every great fortune lies great crime." Thinking that billionaires can lead the "fight against inequality" is looking at it from a capitalist "well, this is just how things are" ideology - instead of analysing how many humans, non-humans and natural resources have been exploited in the building of that fortune.

Also, the paradox is that certain billionaires keep giving away tons of money yet they somehow still have more money than they have ever had. Say whut? Is it really "giving away" money? Or is it returned in some way, i.e. through endowments?

2. If attacks on billionaire philanthropy decrease billionaires’ donations, is that acceptable collateral damage in the fight against inequality?

Here Smokestar codex suggests that people will die if billionaires get offended by criticism. The implicit argument is that lives would not be saved without billionaire benevolence. Leaving aside the anthropocentricism of what global "progress" looks like (see: etymology of "philanthropy", lol), human development (longer lifespan, fewer wars, higher incomes, fewer diseases) over the past centuries has been led by government or state intervention, not by billionaire philanthropy. It's an appeal to ignorance to suggest that many lives would be lost (or saved) if billionaires stopped giving.

Interestingly, he then switches to say the fight is against 'inequality', not people dying. Putting on my psychopath hat, if anything, by saving more lives in the developing world, you are adding to the number of people in the poorest sector of society, thereby increasing inequality. Are billionaire philanthropists trying to save lives or reduce inequality? They are two different things.

3. Do billionaires really get negative reactions from donating? Didn’t I hear that they get fawning praise and total absence of skepticism?

Finally, an answer I vaguely agree with! Yes, there is a lot of internet criticism of billionaires (*world's smallest violin*). However, Stardex codex conflates social media with traditional media. Individuals are justifiably wary of billionaire philanthropy (back to the notion of hypocrisy, above). Traditional media agencies, on the other hand, tend to fawn over these guys (who often provide at least some, if not a large part of their funding - NBC, Sky, Guardian BBC, Al Jazeera MTV, BET, NPR, Universal Media LLC...) and they don't receive the same checks and balances as say, Russian oligarchs or even government aid programs. (See pre-2019 pieces on Bill Gates by Vox, for example - all fluff). There's also instances of certain foundations getting their feet wet in cultural production - writing scripts for TV shows, for example.

Sadly, I don't think billionaires or the wider public tend to trawl through tweets or individual blog posts critical of billionaire philanthropy. Only Bezos bros who get butthurt over criticism of their fav multimillionaires. So while Starslate codex infers criticism is widespread and prominent (I wish!), it really is not. Great deep-dive on this in Citations Needed Ep. 45.

4. Is it a problem that billionaire philanthropy is unaccountable to public democratic institutions? Should we make billionaires pay that money as taxes instead, so the public can decide how it gets spent?

Again, a lot of hypothesizing here. The examples Sparestar codex cites are US-based (perhaps where billionaires have more oversight over how and where their money is spent). Yes, the government may be shitty right now (in our opinion), and if we increase taxes on billionaires, government will use that money to enact shitty policies.

But to suggest that the only (better) option is to give billionaires free reign to do as they please is a false dilemma. In Jeff Bezos' $10bn Earth Fund (basically a venture designed to invest in "the green sector", profiting from and influencing how transition happens), and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, we see both have chosen to forego handing out their profits to established, locally-owned NGOs with experience working in the field. Instead, they expand their investment portfolios while making themselves laudable AF. Their philanthropy would be better directed at empowering existing grassroots organizations already working on the cause, or solving issues of democracy which cause poor domestic government policy in the first place. But back to that can of worms a bit later.

5. Those are some emotionally salient examples, but doesn’t the government also do a lot of good things?

I'm gonna go out on a whim here and say that actually, the more billionaires are praised for their philanthropy, the less governments feel the need to intervene with decent policy. It's fine, billionaires got our back.

Starsex Codex says "I wish I could give a more detailed breakdown of how philanthropists vs. the government spend their money, but I can’t find the data. Considerations like the above make me think that philanthropists in general are better at focusing on the most important causes."

Again, setting aside what we personally consider to be the most important causes (I, like Codex, agree that climate change is of utmost importance), shifting power from government (which can and should be held accountable by its people) to rich individuals and corporations is a dangerous move. We may THINK that billionaires are "better at focusing on the most important causes". But this is tied to the cultural ideal that because they are rich, or donate to the causes we like, they know what is best. While the rest of everybody is selfishly concerned with issues of workplace wage gaps, lack of affordable healthcare or food stamps.

(Quick word on Hewlett, and "not finding the data": the other glaring, not cute issue is that these huge donations are pledged with major media announcements, but rarely followed up. And we are usually naive enough to believe them, not knowing exactly how much is handed over in the end, and how much is subject to tax relief, and how much reaches intended beneficiaries. This is an issue arising from lack of accountability and underfunded independent journalism.)

6. The point of democracy isn’t that it’s always right, the point is that it respects the popular will. Regardless of whether the popular will is good or bad, don’t powerful private foundations violate it?

Wow, Bill Gates has an approval rating higher than God! We should all happily let him allocate the world's financial resources as he sees fit!

Sarcasm aside, again the reason billionaires are so highly regarded compared to governments is the go-get-it American Dream neoliberal system in which they thrive (this is particularly pertinent in the US). Government policy is subject to intense scrutiny by the media. Their actions are justly seen as directly impacting us or an attempt to represent the public will. Billionaires' actions are not. When billionaires err (e.g. by buying six hundred superyachts), it's annoying, but we can't really do anything because we didn't vote for them and it doesn't really make our lives crappier in any way. But when they do something good, we all go wow!! Look how much better they are than government! #Oprah4Prez!

As if no one learned any lessons from electing a billionaire as president.

Incidentally, for fun, can you imagine if Bezos/Gates did become the president? Do you think they would still achieve the same approval ratings, or would their rampant expenditures (philanthropic or otherwise) FINALLY be subjected to popular scrutiny?

7. Shouldn’t people who disagree with the government’s priorities fight to change the government, not go off and do their own thing?

The crux of the matter. Here Slatestar Codex uses a straw man example to portray how billionaire interests and government interests are opposed. I'd argue that if anything, they work in beautiful tandem. Government pursues policies (e.g. pro-war, anti-immigrant, nationalistic) that they have been elected by the people to implement. These are often ostensibly against the interests/ideologies of wealthy and educated elites. This legitimizes billionaires going off and doing their own thing. The cream of society (people like me and you, the top 10%) then cheerlead the billionaires, whose causes tend to be the same as our own, further stoking class animosity. There is an unspoken agreement that govs and billionaires will let the other do what they want without facing repercussions. When everyone influential is happy, why would billionaires bother changing the status quo?

Slatestar codex chooses the highly representative example of a ladder in Jerusalem to illustrate the futility of attempting to change government. But as I mentioned before, hasn't human progress to this day been largely due to the interventions of democratically-elected governments and political movements, not billionaires?

8. Is billionaire philanthropy getting too powerful? Should we be terrified by the share of resources now controlled by unaccountable charitable foundations?

Depends what lens you look at it from. Of course, comparing it to US federal budget as Statestar Codex does, it is miniscule. When applied to the context of vulnerable communities in developing countries (to which billionaire philanthropy is usually applied), it is huge. It overwhelms local resources and development efforts. It changes the geopolitics and economies of entire areas and regions. Listen to Mariam Mayet, executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity, in the second half of Episode 46 of the Citations Needed podcast.

9. Does billionaire philanthropy threaten pluralism?

Interesting. Best to ask its beneficiaries, I think. (Which we don't do nearly enough of, by the way.)

The idea that Slatestar Codex puts forward here is that certain projects are carried out only thanks to private donations from the super rich. If it hadn't been for them, these projects would've been canned. Again, this is framed in a government v. billionaire philanthropists dichotomy.

Yet ironically, the very notion of one person being in charge of which cause(s) receive(s) a fuckton of money is very un-pluralistic. Perhaps various different billionaires donating to their individual causes is slightly more pluralistic than one government or body donating to various causes (??? who's to say). But in other parts of the world, where that billionaire's money is the only source of income for a project, it has the potential for making the work of other smaller groups redundant. The billionaire's funding ends up monopolising the cause. This is particularly worrying when the billionaire themselves has very little expertise on the cause in question (see: Jeff Bezos not being a climate scientist).

More recently, foundations have moved towards "closed door policies" based on evidence-based planning. They often don't accept unsolicited applications or proposals from grassroots organizations, instead giving money to corporations or established grantees. Clientelism, corruption - and lack of pluralism.

10. Aren’t the failures of government just due to Donald Trump or people like him? Won’t they hopefully get better soon?

"No. My whole point is that if you force everyone to centralize all money and power into one giant organization with a single point of failure, then when that single point of failure fails, you’re really screwed." - Slatestar Codex

Isn't that what basically the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is? Or what the Bezos Earth Fund is? Isn't it simply what one human with an inordinate amount of wealth is?

Not to mention that they are completely unaccountable. (Also not forgetting that Donald Trump is a billionaire with a now-extinct "charitable" foundation).

11. So you’re saying these considerations about pluralism and representation and so on justify billionaire philanthropy?

Ahh, a very emotive way to finish off, Codex. How am I supposed to argue against the storybook idea of billions of lives being saved by mega-rich philanthropists?

It is virtually impossible to prove that lives have been saved directly as a result of money (supposedly) donated by billionaires (remember - government and state intervention and legal regulation of corporations has played a leading role in human development and progress around the world - say it to yourself in the mirror every day). This is also a really low-hanging metric. Life expectancy has been growing for the past few hundred years, largely thanks to government policy and cooperation, leading and guiding private investment.

There's a been a distinct failure among billionaire philanthropists to step up and encourage/insist their mates, other businesses and corporations, to get involved with global development and bolster domestic social safety nets. Corporations are sanitised in the public eye, solving problems rather than magnifying them. What about the unspoken negative externalities of the practice of accruing wealth? How many more billions of living beings are being harmed directly or indirectly by those externalities?

Finally, while these billionaires are probably not intentionally "bad guys", it doesn't really matter. What matters are the material effects of what they do. Their good intentions are irrelevant, as they are stuck in the capitalist ideology that there is nothing inherently wrong with the way they have acquired their wealth. As a result, the idea that economic dynamism and growth leads to social prosperity goes unquestioned.