MacKenzie Scott is giving away her fortune. The next step is doing away with Big Philanthropy all together.
For our cultural life to become healthy, it has to be community-supported
MacKenzie Scott, the world’s 5th richest woman and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced that she’s giving away all her wealth “until the safe is empty.” But that’s not the most interesting part of the story, what’s really interesting is how she’s doing it: with no strings attached.
You see, when rich people make donations, the money often comes with all sorts of requirements and restrictions. They want to know exactly how it’s being used. They usually only want to support specific programs and not an organization’s “overhead” (i.e. “the food pantry, but only the cost of the food, not the rent for the space or the salaries for the staff,” as it’s been described). They also have explicit targets they want recipients to meet (“reduce hunger by X percent or improve graduation rates by Y percent”). And of course, at the end of the day they want reams of reports detailing how every dollar was spent.
So it’s understandable that working with such “helicopter donors” can be exhausting. In contrast, MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic platform — Yield Giving — asks none of these things. It simply gives money away and leaves it at that, an approach that’s been called “trust-based philanthropy.”
Now that’s a revolutionary idea: trusting people. As you can imagine, that kind of empowerment, that kind of unconditional support, is a powerful thing. As one nonprofit leader described it, “It was a rush of affirmation that we had never before received.”
But no-strings-attached giving isn’t only important because it “feels good” — because it treats people with respect, as if they were actually trustworthy. One of the main reasons no-strings-attached funding is important is because it’s also more effective. As I detailed in a recent article, people are far more productive when they can freely pursue their own aims, when they aren’t constantly micromanaged and forced to do the bidding of those who control the purse strings.
This doesn’t mean that MacKenzie Scott isn’t doing “due diligence.” Her team researches everyone they support — they figure out who they think is the most capable and trustworthy — it’s just they do it on the front end, at the very start. Once they give the money, they leave their recipients alone, they leave them free to use the money as they think best.
That said, though MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic approach is far healthier than the norm, it’s still part of a larger problem in the field of philanthropy: the outsized role that the super rich play in the process. Philanthropy — like business and government before it — has become “Big Philanthropy.”
When we think about the problems with philanthropy, we often focus on the mega donors we dislike (George Soros, the Koch brothers) and less on the fact that they’re able to make such huge donations in the first place. A 2020 Guardian article describes the situation:
When donors hold views we detest, we tend to see them as unfairly tilting policy debates with their money. Yet when we like their causes, we often view them as heroically stepping forward to level the playing field against powerful special interests or backward public majorities… These sort of à la carte reactions don’t make a lot of sense. Really, the question should be whether we think it’s OK overall for any philanthropists to have so much power to advance their own vision of a better society.
That article goes on to describe how most charitable giving isn’t some sort of altruistic redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. In reality, most philanthropy goes from elite individuals to elite institutions (such as universities and museums) and is often given in order to avoid paying higher taxes.
Not only that though — giving can also be a form of power over others. When billionaires donate, they exert a profound influence on culture and politics. That influence is even more dramatic when it comes to so-called developing countries. International aid groups like Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, and mega-philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, can end up providing much of the essential services in such countries. This means they often “direct development strategies and craft government policies for their hosts,” taking on the responsibilities and powers that would otherwise abide in elected officials, and becoming modern-day colonialists in the process.
It would put power in the hands of politicians if such donations were instead collected as tax revenue — an alternative some prefer (believing politicians represent the people) and some dislike (believing politicians are corrupt). But are these really our only two choices: Big Government or Big Philanthropy?
MacKenzie Scott recognizes that Big Philanthropy is a problem. In her article “Seeding by Ceding” she writes:
Any wealth is a product of a collective effort… We are attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. My team’s efforts are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.
So, according to Scott, it would be better if rich people weren’t so rich — their wealth wasn’t born of individual success alone, but of a “collective effort” that was “enabled by systems in need of change.” This is clearly true, but what are those systems and how do we change them?
Unfortunately, Scott never addresses this question, but instead lays the problem at the feet of those who are struggling just to offer the most basic services — the nonprofits she’s supporting. Her intention is good (in another essay she writes, “people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions”), but it’s also short-sighted. How exactly will systemic change arise from thousands and thousands of partial solutions? How will we change the whole, when no one is trying to perceive the whole, but only their small part? Can we really expect “Meals on Wheels” to address the systemic inequities that cause widespread hunger?
The truth is almost no one is trying to deal with such problems at a systemic level. The previously mentioned Guardian article highlights this issue:
When it comes to addressing inequality, a well intentioned philanthropist might finance educational bursaries for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, or fund training schemes to equip low-paid workers for better jobs. That allows a few people to exit bad circumstances, but it leaves countless others stuck in under-performing schools or low-paid insecure work at the bottom of the labor market. Very few concerned philanthropists think of financing research or advocacy to address why so many schools are poor or so many jobs are exploitative. Such an approach, says David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy, is like “nurturing saplings while the forest is being cleared.”
That said, the Guardian article itself doesn’t say much about larger systemic problems, except in passing. At one point, it mentions the legacy of the 19th century “robber baron philanthropists” — men like Andrew Carnegie who ruthlessly squeezed every dime from their impoverished workers while building libraries for them to “elevate their aspirations” — and says that
Carnegie and his fellows, their critics said, neglected the great ethical question of the day, which centered on “the distribution rather than the redistribution of wealth.”
Now that is a systemic issue. Why is wealth distributed in the way that it is? And why do we focus so much on redistributing it when, as MacKenzie Scott says, it was ill-begotten (i.e. “enabled by systems in need of change”) in the first place? Why not get to the root of the problem and change the original distribution of profits?
The fact that the Guardian relegates this question to the past — seeing it as “the great ethical question” of that time, but not our time — shows how far we’ve strayed from true systemic thinking. The social problems we face have grown in complexity and scale over the last century, but our thinking about them has shrunk. We’ve gotten stuck in the weeds. We’ve lost the big picture.
For those readers interested in wrestling with this question of a healthy distribution of profits, I’d refer you to a few articles I’ve written on the topic (here, here, and here). At this point though, I only want to take a moment to look at it from the point of view of a truly healthy philanthropy.
When we look at the impact of Big Philanthropy on our systems of politics and culture, we have to ask why rich people play such an outsized role. Surely the government should represent the will of the people equally, and surely culture is an individual affair. So why should the rich have any say in which politicians get elected and what legislation gets passed? And why should they determine what a scientist researches, an artist creates, or a teacher teaches? How is that at all healthy for society? The reality is, it’s not.
Let’s stay with this example of funding culture. First off, we should recognize that such funding is currently a patchwork — most cultural workers depend on donations and grants, some sell their work commercially, and others are supported through taxes (for instance, public school teachers). But in almost all these examples, you have a wealthy person or institution standing behind the cultural worker, enabling them to give their gifts. But why should they get to decide who can give their gifts? What if, instead, cultural workers were supported by the recipients of their gifts? What if culture was community-supported?
If that was the case — if everyone had enough money to support culture — we’d have a very, very different cultural landscape. Here’s a simple way to imagine it: in 2013, the academic Robert McChesney proposed that every U.S. citizen receive a $200 media voucher from the government to give to the news outlets of their choice. Can you imagine the rich diversity of voices that would have emerged if the government had agreed?
Now imagine we funded art, medicine, research, religion, and education the same way? Imagine everyone just got vouchers for all these things, and then chose the type of education they thought best for their children, and the type of healthcare they wanted, even if it was considered “alternative” by the mainstream. Can you see how our culture would arise out of the real values living in everyday people, and not out of what the rich and powerful think best?
Of course such voucher programs would still not be getting at the root of the problem — they’d still just be redistributing wealth through the government — but they might be a good first step. Most importantly though, they’re not hard to imagine, so we can see that the ideal of community-supported culture isn’t far-fetched. (And such voucher programs wouldn’t have to be government-run, MacKenzie Scott and her fellow billionaires could just as easily create them — put their money into “community-directed funds” where everyday people can decide where the money goes. And if you’re reading this, MacKenzie, I’d be happy to help!)
But to actually deal with the larger question of how wealth is distributed in the first place will require a much deeper step in how we work with economics. A just distribution will only come about when we’re able to realize what the social reformer Rudolf Steiner called “true prices” — when people receive the money necessary to meet all of their needs (not just their material needs, but also their cultural needs and the needs of their dependents), until they can create the same product or service again. This is not just a basic income so people don’t starve, but a dignified income that supports people’s full development. But trying to unpack that will take us too far afield. It will have to wait for a future article :)
Some “practical” people will of course imagine that it would be a disaster if culture wasn’t run by rich philanthropists and politicians. They imagine a kind of Wild West where people would surely fall prey to all sorts of misinformation. “No,” they say, “it’s better to have some trustworthy party providing ‘content moderation’ for the people and filtering out all the bad stuff.” But who is that trustworthy party? Is it the Democrats? Or the Republicans? Is it Bill Gates? Or Peter Thiel? Or maybe MacKenzie Scott?
This kind of elitism won’t last forever; eventually, we won’t stand for it. We will demand an equal say in our political life and full freedom in how we develop ourselves culturally. But we shouldn’t wait for things to become too unbearable. We should have foresight and start working towards such systemic changes now.
It won’t be an easy road. If we want freedom for ourselves, then we’ll also have to grant it to others, which means we’ll have to learn to trust one another — a seemingly impossible task in a society that’s been whipped to a frenzy in hatred of the other. But it’s the road we have to walk, the road towards healing. And initiatives like MacKenzie Scott’s, if we’re able to sense what’s healthy in them, can be signposts that point us along the way.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the knowledge they want?
Seth, this is well-said and provocative, as always. At the risk of misrepresenting your point of view, though, I'll lay out a couple of reservations I have about the implication that systemic change is more needed than incremental changes.
First, there are some who argue that direct giving (donations that go right to individuals or small communities rather than to aid organizations) is the most effective and efficient way to donate. Evidence Action is the main group I'm familiar with in this area. Of course, I don't know what the research says about the long-term effects of this kind of giving, or whether the effects ripple outward to become something more systemic.
Also, Steiner has a kind of ladder of morality in his Philosophy of Freedom, in which actions motivated by the public good are seen as higher than those coming from egoism--but both can still be seen as unfree. The highest level is action out of "love for the deed" coming from intuition and not from a pre-conceived mental picture. We have all seen examples of "progressive" action that came across as anything but humane or loving. Which is just to say, acting out of our vision of an ideal social structure doesn't guarantee that our actions are done at the highest level of free morality, or that they honor the spiritual freedom of others.
I tend to feel we have our hands full navigating between our occasional free actions and our habitual unfree ones. I don't trust myself to design, or even endorse, a plan for systemic social change. Much as I love Steiner's vision of the threefold society, I can't see how it can come about except through lots and lots of small, localized acts or initiatives, lots of people stepping off the moving walkway to interact with others in a different way. This would be good practice in cultivating a new morality based on love, and maybe the model for systemic change from the bottom up.
Let me know if I've totally missed your point, or if you have any reaction to my reactions!