The Giving Pledge keeps giving—as a source of inspiration for philanthropy bloggers, journalists, and commentators.
The Giving Pledge is the effort by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage other rich people to give at least half their money away. So far, they’ve succeeded in convincing 40 rich people and families to take the pledge.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Dennis says the Gateses and Mr. Buffett aren’t likely to have anywhere near the positive impact in their philanthropy as they’ve had in their business lives. Ms. Dennis, president of the Searle Freedom Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes free-market policies, asks readers to “think for a moment: Can you point to a single charitable accomplishment that has been as transformative as, say, the cellphone or the birth-control pill?”
Ms. Dennis also wonders why businesspeople feel they have a responsibility to “give back.”
“Giving back implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken?” she writes. “Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned from investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value.”
Ron Rosenbaum, a writer for the online-magazine Slate, also says the pledge needs some rejiggering. But he approaches that argument from a very different perspective.
“Show us the money if you want the credit,” he writes. “And show it to us now, before you die, not in some distant future where a lot of poor and diseased people will themselves have died for lack of timely aid.”
The philanthropist Lewis B. Cullman also has a skeptical view of the Giving Pledge, telling The Wall Street Journal that money donated by the megarich too often ends up locked within foundations that release only a trickle of support.
“My opinion [of the pledge] is: So what?” said Mr. Cullman, a benefactor of New York cultural institutions who the Journal says has given hundreds of millions away. He says that foundations should be required to spend more than the currently mandated 5 percent of their assets, or adopt “sunset clauses” to distribute their assets within a set time.
What’s your take in this continuing debate?
0 Responses to Thoughts on Improving—or Scrapping—the Giving Pledge
nanook - August 23, 2010 at 2:09 pm
How can we compare Gates’s of Buffet’s charitable accomplishments with their business accopmlishments? Obviously they cannot be measured by the same standards. To say that one has been more influential than the other is beside the point.And to say that people like Gates and Buffet have amassed great wealth, but have not taken anything from others is contradictory. To amass wealth is to take from others; the only reason others have so little is because people like Gates and Buffet have so much; hence, unequal distribution. Gates himself has called for higher taxation of the megarich and has voiced concern regarding the ability of individuals to amass such vast quantities of wealth. To say that he has earned his wealth it utterly ridiculous.But philanthropy itself is built on a foundation of racial and economic hierarchy and lacks the ability to be truly transformative. “Giving” has become status symbolism and lacks accountability as non-profits these days are solely focused on getting cozy with private foundations and securing funding; they become accountable to the foundations rather than the communities and people they had initially sought to assist, and fall into the business and corporate model driven by desire for revenue and revenue-producing structures.Therefore, I am just as skeptical of mainstream philanthropic efforts as I am of Ms. Dennis’s ill-informed response to The Giving Pledge. Neither approach will produce real transformation. When real transformation does occur, it will happen in the grassroots, among the poor, the oppressed, the minorities – not the capitalistic frequenters of Wall Street.One more thing – Ms. Dennis is an idiot.
iloveschoolsdotcom - August 27, 2010 at 12:04 am
How will the non-profit world turn from a money redistribution system into one that creates true sustainability? What the megarich can do for nonprofits is guide us into this practice i.e. via social enterprises.To question any person’s intent for giving or, one’s delivery date for the cash is puzzling. It sounds like the writers are complaining that one donor gets one level of social-stature for donating $1b today vs. another getting the same level of social-stature for donating $100m each year over 10 years (with John Q. public under the perception that they’re donating the full billion today)? That’s what the complaint is? The philanthropist is giving $100m a year for goodness sakes. It’s also good business to pace money out so it doesn’t all go down the drain – safeguards these philanthropists have learned in their business careers most likely.Finally, one can be certain that the nonprofit world will see no cell-phone levels of success if we keep doing things the same old way. I do know one thing however. The megarich accumulated this wealth and are not stuffing it in their mattresses. They’re looking into each other’s hearts to find ways the can give back. Giving back in my opinion is all our duty – not something measured quantatively but, as a measure of one’s success and thanks to the people who helped them achieve that success. If the complaint is they’re giving the money to foundations who dole it out exceedingly slow then perhaps the megarich can streamline the pipeline. All organizations, systems and procedures could become more lean over time. The good thing about successful business people is that they have a history of doing so without getting someone (customers) to put money in their coffers if they did an inefficient job (i.e. like inefficient NPO’s and traditional grant/foundation funding).This is change we all need. We should embrace it. When was the last time the megarich invited us to the table? How will they react if we were to slap their hands away because of our judging their intent?
81010292 - August 27, 2010 at 11:32 am
This is not a reply to Nanook, but to those who might be persuaded by anything he has said here. The critical point to notice is his phrase “amassing wealth”. Bill Gates, other titans of industry, and a huge number of smaller business owner do not amass wealth: they create wealth. His failure to grasp he distinction between the two indicates a complete misunderstanding of how wealth is generated and spread by market competition, the division of labor and the reallocation of resources thus freed up. The most obvious byproduct of the creation of wealth is the resulting creation of jobs, new products and other activities. Ideally, in a free economy, those who create wealth deal with others by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange – an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. They do not force people to buy their products or use their services. Capitalism is called a system of greed, yet it is that system, even in a mixed economy, that has raised the standard of living of the poorest to heights no redistributionist system has ever begun to equal. Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. There is a huge body of work on wealth creation that I urge readers to seek out.