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I feel like when I first encountered the argument 'we ought to critique billionaire philanthropy', the angle it took was "we shouldn't uncritically praise it without thinking about its effects". And I am 100% on board with that. Results matter.
The critiques of billionaire philanthopy I see today don't have that element. Anand Giridharadas: "[Zuckerberg is] trying to get rid of all the world’s diseases, as if public education wasn’t a hard enough problem,” he added. “We have doctors." vox.com/recode/2019/5/…
...okay, but is Zuckerberg actually making any progress on reducing the global burden of disease? Anand's critique as I understand it is not 'he's failing to have effects', it's that it is fundamentally unjust that he be in a position to try.
Throughout the full interview, he never mentions what effects any of the programs he discusses had on the recipients. This is exclusively a discussion of the effects they had on public perception of the billionaires, with no acknowledgement there's anything else to discuss.
And that critique of philanthropy is one that I just can't get behind. Does Zuckerberg gain reputational benefits from philanthropy that have harms to society? Probably. Does the way we think about billionaires as a consequence of philanthropy cause harms? Probably.
But *whether or not millions of lives have been saved* cannot be irrelevant to this critique. This critique should not be indifferent to whether it's talking about a non-ideal exercise of power that saves millions of lives or a non-ideal exercise of power with no benefits.
A conversation about billionaire philanthropy that seeks to make us more aware of its costs is great. A conversation about billionaire philanthropy that is utterly disinterested in its benefits makes me deeply uncomfortable.
The whole thing seems to rest on an assumption that whatever good billionaires are doing, some other process could do better, so we don't need to worry about whether they're doing good. But *would* that other process happen? And who would suffer in the meantime?
And if you don't even care what billionaires are doing, how can you be so sure it'll get done without them? I don't see how we move from non-results-oriented critiques of philanthropy to meaningfully results-oriented policy. And that scares me.
