When I was younger, I remember reading Rhold Dahl all the time, I even did a school project on him once. One of his stories really stood out to me, “The wonderful tale of Henry Sugar.” The story follows a young man by the name of Henry Sugar, who trains himself to be able to see through playing cards, being the type of man he is, he uses this power to gain an incredible  advantage over casinos. On his first night of gambling, he of course wins a lot of money, and when he returns home, he starts throwing wads of cash from his balcony, down onto the street below. Now after causing quite a bit of excitement, a police officer angrily comes up to his apartment and starts yelling at him for throwing money down. Now, Henry of course is surprised, he’s giving away free money after all, but the officer explains to him that there are much better ways to give away money, then to throw it down to random people. And this happens in the real world too, rich people giving back in the worst way possible, and sometimes all for publicity. Even worse, they might not be giving back at all, and that’s because modern philanthropy just isn’t what it seems.

One form of philanthropy that closely resembles Henry Sugar's tale, is “Twitter philanthropy.” Twitter Philanthropy is rich influencers “giving back” to their community, by hosting cash giveaways on social media sites like Twitter. They don’t choose who wins, it's all completely random. On the surface it seems like a very charitable act, but it really isn’t. Typically, the way someone would enter one of these giveaways, is by liking a tweet, or commenting on the post.(1)  What all of those do, is give the creator more attention, and in the world of social media, attention equals money.

Not only that but simply being known for hosting giveaways will make you much more popular, and that just means more money for you. Even worse, most of the time these people are giving away to the wrong type of person. If you try and think about the target demographic for these content creators, most are younger, and most will have an interest in gaming, and regularly browse Twitter, and those traits don’t exactly line up with those in need. The people who could use the money the most, most likely don’t have open access to the internet, or even a device.

In short, most online philanthropy is usually nothing more than a publicity stunt, one which always benefits the creator, and rarely benefits the recipient. So maybe now you’re thinking that online philanthropy isn’t so good, but in the real world, billionaires are giving away millions of dollars to charities, right? Wrong.

One popular route that philanthropists take is a foundation. Again on the surface, non-profit foundations may seem good, but the fact is a payment to a foundation is counted as a “charitable donation” and therefore a tax deductible. So billionaire philanthropists can give all their money to foundations as an excuse to take money away from the people. In 2013, charitable tax deductions cost the government so much, they could have funded the entire Department of Education. (2)

But hold on, when I say that these billionaires give all their money away, I don’t mean it, because tax laws only require non-profit foundations to give away 5% of their income annually, and that could just be on basic expenses, like wages and water bills.(3) Do for all intents and purposes, they still have their money, like what happened with the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative.(4)

Even when these foundations give money to good causes, it is in the most un-demacratic way possible. Normally our democratically elected officials use the people’s money to fund basic public needs, like road repair, and healthcare. But when these philanthropists donate their money, it goes to a cause that their rich donors support, which lines up with public need so little that less than 10% of the money donated ends up going towards it.(5)

Even in the rare case of philanthropists’ interests lining up with the public’s, we have to ask ourselves, why do we have a world where rich people need to give back to people? Why don’t we base a world around not having incredibly poor people, and not having incredibly rich people, instead of basing one around needing the incredibly rich to give to the incredibly poor. Instead of fighting for the wealthy to give back more, we should be fighting for them to pay more taxes so that our government can afford social services. We like to think that philanthropy is the saving grace, when in fact it’s been the problem all along.

Bibliography
(1)  DNP3, twitter.com/DNPthree/status/1323275556767567873

(2)  Casselman, Ben. “The Tax Deductions Economists Hate.” FiveThirtyEight, ABC News, 3rd April 2015, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/.

(3) Pacific Foundation Services, 2016.

(4) Singer, Natasha, and Mike Isaac. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Uses L.L.C. for More Control.” New York Times, 2nd December 2015, nytimes.com/2015/12/03/technology/zuckerbergs-philanthropy-uses-llc-for-more-control.html.

(5) Singer, Peter. “What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?” New York Times Magazine, 17th December 2006, nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html.