Can billionaires make the world a better place?
The top 500 richest people in the world saw their wealth grow to a trillion dollars by 2017
And in 2018, the 26 richest billionaires held a net worth of more than half the world’s poorest population (3.8 billion people).
The criticism of modern development is that it allows the rich to keep getting richer, while the poor keep getting poorer; ultimately casting the rich as the winners of the current system.
Philanthrocapitalists are global elites that use business techniques and individual initiatives, often bypassing governments, to take on social objectives and prioritize capitalistic practices in order to produce a financial return on the giving investments. These high-net-worth icons seek to solve public problems, while actively exacerbating many of the existing public problems.
High-profile celebrities are self-appointed leaders of social change; and their power can pull aid towards a particular cause or development problem that appeals to them and away from others.
Many of the rich have rationalized their actions as humanitarianism, arguing that their actions fall under effective altruism, which is a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world.
Elites such as Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffet, who are devoting billions to improving global health are making substantial contributions to the greater good. However, the belief that the rich are destined to steer the processes of social change is self-serving.
In this way, elites rewrite the truth: that private initiatives, not public institutions such as governments or unions, are key to social success. Such that a new software, for example, can be presented as creating opportunities for all, even if it might have very little to do with addressing broader social issues like poverty, homelessness, plunging wages, job insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, etc.
Today’s icons offer the promise of limitless change without changing the limits of existing society.
The answer is not to increase the ability of the rich to help the poor. An act of philanthropy does little to question or address the system that created the conditions for lives needing to be saved.
Donors who give to distant locations are freed from the messy reality of the communities they serve because there is no need ever to encounter them face-to-face when unintended consequences are generated by that intervention.
It is the recognition and the giver’s reputation that provides a “market-based incentive” for wealthy individuals and corporations to help the poor.
Charity work will always be entangled with capitalism, so long as abundance exists alongside deprivation.
Extreme riches do not exist on their own but are often built on the poverty and exploitation of others.
Serving as ambassadors or honorary advisors for the UN or other international or non-governmental organizations, the rich have become synonymous with humanitarianism. Their audience, and the source of their wealth and power, is predominantly Western.
“The worst slave owners were those who were “kind,” because they ended up rationalizing slavery under the pretence of their enlightened good-ness, but in so doing may have helped prevent the politicization of the slaves and prolong the very institution of slavery.”
While the “recognition” accorded to the good deeds of the powerful and wealthy may have grown exponentially over the past 40 years, it has also seen a historically unprecedented and widely documented escalation of social and economic inequality with severe negative effects for the poorest and most vulnerable people globally.
Today’s icons suppress the preponderance and root causes of inequality and injustice. Their interventions are self-congratulatory and generally have very little interest in whether their actions are really making substantive differences for the long term.
There is no “better” celebrity because to be a “celebrity” in of itself is already to be invested in dominant power structures.
Dealing with poverty, conceptually, is not so difficult; but implementing political solutions to reduce poverty and address inequality is much more challenging. It requires fundamental change. Such structural change is not part of the programme of billionaire philanthropists. Their philanthropy might be altruistic and effective, but it is surface-level.
The remedy itself becomes part of the problem because rather than making inequality impossible, it merely tries to keep “poor” people alive, by enabling them to survive through charity.
“Perhaps the most depoliticizing move here is that, by trying to cure the symptom rather than the cause, the current global discourse on humanitarianism ends up prolonging inequality.”
REFERENCES
Abdur Rehman Shah, Winners take all: the elite charade of changing the world, International Affairs, Volume 95, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 1178–1179
Fridell, G., Fridell, G., Konings, M., Fridell, G., & Konings, M. (2013). Age of icons: exploring philanthrocapitalism in the contemporary world. University of Toronto Press.
Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, (New York, New York: Knopf).
Singer, P. (2015). The most good you can do : How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically.
Susan Appe (2019) Philanthropy and Civil Society: Comparative Perspectives on Private Solutions to Public Problems, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, DOI: 10.1080/13876988.2019.1670894
April Marie Canillo 