ALTRUISM OR EGO? THE LIMITATIONS AND RISKS OF TOP-DOWN PHILANTHROPY

It is easy to believe that we are stuck with this humanitarian aid system- the pot of money at $38 billion of public funding seems huge and it is controlled by forces that don’t believe in a change in the existing power dynamics. But we are depending on a very small number of people to make these global decisions. The US government alone contributes 39% of all humanitarian funding and this figure rests ultimately in the hands of very few people. We have shown in the third blog in this series that in other richer countries a small group of bureacrats are making aid decisions that further the interests of the state they are employed by. The top decision makers for the most part are elected officials, but are they really representing the interests of their constituents when they make these decisions about humanitarian aid? Do we need to leave it to such a small group of people to make decisions about how 81% of all global humanitarian aid funding is distributed?

The $38 billion that this 81% comprises of is not a lot of money. If we were to take the populations of the top 20 countries that contribute the vast majority of this funding, at around 1 billion people, this constitutes around $38 per person per year. Of this figure we must remember that a lot of it never reaches vulnerable populations but instead gets stuck funding the salaries of people and contracts for companies from the same rich countries. The same total constitutes a paltry $93 per person affected by crisis per year – that’s about $0.25 cents a day. Again not a lot of this reaches vulnerable populations. We saw this first hand when a donor expected us to reach 7000 children with an aid intervention, allowing us to spend only $50 per child reached throughout a three year programme. A bulk of that then went on Cohere costs, including salaries. Aid is negligible and we are surprised that it isn’t working.

When we notice that our governments are only allocating $38 for each of us in humanitarian aid it is natural that many of us will want to start sharing resources and doing so in ways we think are more effective. Those of us who can should all get more involved in sharing our resources so that we can rebalance the pathetic contributions being made on our behalf by our governments. But how should we do it? Let’s take a moment to look at how private donors have typically shared their resources with humanitarian ideals, and what they have been getting wrong.

Philanthropists and such Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson give away their funds in ways they think are effective in achieve the goals they have for the world. Foundations for large corporates do the same. Sometimes these kinds of donors are accused of investing their charitable giving into sectors and value chains that are linked to the sectors where they made their millions. They are also accused of giving for primarily tax benefit reasons. There are clearly examples of private or corporate giving machines that are set up primarily as a way of “whitewashing” dubious reputations. This behaviour is regularly highlighted and corporates and individual donors are taken through the ring, often appropriately.

While private donors have regularly been accused of promoting self-interests in their foundation’s strategy, they typically have more independence to be able to focus their giving strategies and not be caught up in a complex web of geopolitic and domestic political interests in the way that public donors are. As such we could have reasons to believe that private donor funding is indeed intended to benefit the lives of vulnerable communities. However, private donor strategies tend to define the change they want to see on behalf of the community they claim to be benefitting. This has major problems which take to their logical conclusion end up being at risk of causing more harm than good. Their definitions for positive change could well be wrong, and there is a very divisive tool they will need to be sure their flawed results happened – due diligence.

Donors define successes for communities which are not successes- and they put a lot of thought and rigor into doing so. The most concerning example I have seen of this is effective altruism movement. The Effective Altruism movement emphasised the importance of empirical evidence and rigorous analysis to identify the most impactful ways to help others. This often involves using randomised controlled trials, cost-effectiveness analyses, and other scientific methods. As such the altruists only knew they were being effective if they could prove their impact, and eventually the movement determined that the only impact that could be proven (if you are an outsider looking at data, that is) was how many lives have been saved and how much a person or group has experienced an increase in income. When it came to these outcomes, the effective altruism movement was able to create metrics which they claimed could indicate the extent to which lives had been saved and incomes had been increased, and as such could indicate how effective was the programme or organisation the altruists were supporting. This then created a hierarchy of effective organisations, with Action Against Malaria consistently (and still to this day) ranked as the most effective organisation to support philanthropically because they would save more lives with the least dollars.

There are many problems with this way of thinking. The first is that the only effective programmes are deemed to be the ones that can be proven to be effective, which by nature probably means they are likely to be effective in an immediate and tangible sense. This should not mean that other interventions are not effective – they might just be harder to prove in the short term. Education, for example, fell victim to this curse. The effective altruism movement deemed that there was no concrete proof that education programmes benefitted anyone, either in terms of the holistic benefit we all gain from the experience of learning, or even in the way that education contributed to their big headline provables – saving lives and increasing incomes. So the effective altruism movement advised philanthropists against funding education; apparently it’s not that effective.

The second problem connected to this is that it was the intellectuals outside of the communities that they were trying to help who decided that saving lives and increasing incomes was a categorical good for the people they were generously helping – and as a consequent result these outcomes are elevated as the most positive changes a community needed to see.

In the case of increasing incomes, this may well not be a categorical good if for example the programme happens to incite divisions between communities. Give Directly, an organisation spawned out of the effective altruism movement was praised for many years as being a very effective way for altruists to give, but their model included randomly selecting villages for a programme of universal basic income, intentionally leaving their neighbouring villages without the offer, partly so that they could study the effects of their altruism against a control group. The effect – increased tension between villages who previously lived together perfectly well, all for the sake of a $20 a month stipend. The programme was effective in increasing incomes, obviously, but what about the impact on community bonds and cohesion, outcomes which the effective altruism sees as unprovable and therefore irrelevant?

Seeing “increased income” as a categorical good is also typical for someone (especially a man) who has been ingrained with the normative values of post-industrial western thinking. Alongside struggling to imagine a world without the institutions such as banks and law courts I described in blog one, those of us from the west find it almost impossible to conceive of wealth in terms that are not monetary, or even really put any value on something that can’t be costed. This isn’t a universal way of thinking. Nomadic tribes in East Africa, for example, will think of material wealth in terms of heads of livestock without necessarily putting a monetary value on each animal. More importantly, they may put more value on social wealth in the form of honour and integrity than on financial gain, and may well only be able to see their personal wealth through the lens of the prosperity and security of their community as a whole. This is all getting pretty foreign to those of us who have grown up believing that democratic market capitalism is the only surviving viable social order. It is also a divergence in how value is conceived and determined that has been entirely missed by the effective altruists and the donors who believe that their vision for a better future is the only version worth considering.

Now, I can concede that “saving lives” can sound like an indisputable goal for humanitarianism (at least for me). But in any programme designed to save lives, decision makers are inevitably faced with the question of which lives they are saving at which cost. Public health administrators are faced with this unenviable task whenever they are allocating resources available for various expensive drugs, thereby implicitly selecting the victims of a particular disease as being more deserving than the victims of another. Originally the effective altruism movement got around this problem by calculating the cost of each life saved and elevating the programmes that saved the most lives with the least dollars. However, eventually it was proposed that saving the life of a child was more effective that saving the life of an elderly person who might soon die anyway. What is more it was more effective to save the life of a healthy person than someone who has a complex health history and would be likely to die soon anyway. So that they could easily do the effectiveness calculations and share the scores with the altruists, they designed a neat moderation formula that gave higher scores for the interventions that saved more valuable lives. Let’s not forget that these are people who know nothing about the community or the people whose lives they are evaluating, determining worthiness of life with a numerical formula, all to ensure that altruists can give away their hard earned cash safe in the knowledge that they are doing so with the upmost effectiveness.

Speaking of hard-earned cash…. this blog is perhaps not the place to remind philanthropists that their wealth is inordinately a result of their privilege. Those of us who have resources to give away are in that position as a result of entrenched global inequalities. Some philanthropists have benefitted implicitly from global inequalities and in other cases it is pretty clear that their wealth is a result of a fairly explicit hoarding of wealth. I’m not sure how much anyone should be congratulating themselves with the moniker of “altruist”. In fact, we will be coming later to how a sense of entitlement and self-congratulation is in itself a negative force in the process of giving, especially in emergency contexts. It could easily constitute another example of doing more harm than good when power imbalances in a human interaction are infiltrated by a sense that one party’s generosity should be met by the other’s party’s indebtedness or obsequiousness. Clearly this is an infringement on the recipient’s dignity, something in which they might actually store more value than the material benefit they have supposedly accrued.

Effective altruism, with the revelation that it is neither effective nor altruistic, is a useful “straw man” in the argument against top-down philanthropy. The dependence on data over human experience has taken it in directions that start to appear whacky and disturbing even for those of us brought up in the west where we are used to results frameworks that are codified and measured in numbers. It is not a surprise that many donors have spurned the effective altruism frameworks but it’s not clear they have learnt the right lessons from the arrival at this extremity of odd behaviour. It is still very rare, for example, for a donor to listen to their grant recipients in defining what success and positive change means for them, and certainly not to listen in a way that is open to diverse and inclusive interpretations of what constitutes value. Instead they impose their value system on that community and release their funds only on the tight conditions that the results of their value system are met. How do they do that? Due diligence and documentation.

In the first blog I explored what the process of due diligence reveals about how donor agencies view their grant recipients, as entities that are mistrusted by default, and only trusted through the medium of documentation. When private donors move increasingly down the same path an inherent contradiction emerges. They are sharing their wealth due to their claimed altruism but they are giving their wealth to people who they do not actually know and therefore do not trust. They are trying to help people they don’t trust to achieve an objective which is supposed to be in their best interest. This could mean one of two things. Either the donor’s strategy is again not connected to the best interests of the people he claims to serve, but somehow serves one of their own interests, even if simply boosting their public image and grabbing soundbites for his record of achievements. Or otherwise he believes he knows what is best for a population and doesn’t have any faith in them also knowing what is best for themselves – hence giving funds based on strict conditions and documentation. This assumption, as well as being inaccurate as we have shown above, is also arrogant and patronising to the point of megalomania. A dose of megalomania is not nice for any community to have to endure, it smacks of that “doing more harm than good” thing that keeps popping up. In either case the question that keeps popping into my mind is “why do you want to give money to people you don’t trust?”

This leads me to my first clear recommendation for change in this blog series. Donors need to stop thinking that they can control or even understand the direct impact they on each individuals if they are to insist on trying to reach thousands or even millions of people. The point is that we don’t have a direct positive impact on thousands or millions of people. None of us do. That does not change just because you turn up on a bigger stage or with more banknotes behind your name. Throughout this blog series I have given examples of how aid funding might try to claim to have a direct impact on thousands of individuals, while the mechanisms for achieving this by their very nature cause more harm than good and negate any efforts towards positive change – due diligence based on mistrust, results frameworks designed by outsiders, an obsession with data over human experience being just a handful.

Even if we could have a direct impact on thousands or millions of people we do not have the right to. Being a philanthropist with a lot of money or a foundation of a corporation with a large fund does not give anyone the right to control the life outcomes of someone they have never met. In fact, it arguably gives them less right if it could be in any way argued that the global order that made them rich is the same global order that kept the vulnerable poor. In such a case it would clearly be more “altruistic” to put their energy into addressing the problems in the global order that have contributed to perpetuated inequality rather than using their philanthropy as an advert campaigning for billionairism.

We can only ever really have a meaningful direct impact on the limited number of people around us. What they do with the opportunities or assets that come out of that relationship should be up to them. Any effort to control what they do after that interaction is at best ineffective.. Worse, by trying to enforce the “downstream aid” a clear statement is being made - I don’t trust you and I don’t trust your methods for implementing my agenda. This is disempowering to the point of infringing on the aid recipients agency and dignity, leading us to question whether the act of giving was even worth it in the first place.