Maybe the best thing about MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy is that she is making other billionaires look terrible.
Ferns in a Forest, Isaac Levitan, 1895, oil on canvass
I wasn’t planning to write about MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy for the newsletter, because it is all anyone is talking about in the nonprofit and philanthropy world this week and we are working on like 5 stories about it at my editor job, including a really good analysis by one of our writers Mike Scutari that touches on some of the points that I have here. But I do have some thoughts on the matter and a couple non-philanthropy people have asked me about it already so maybe I can do something useful here.
I say useful because I get the feeling there is some understandable puzzlement as to whether or not Scott’s multibillion-dollar giving spree is something we should be happy about. When I hear people talking about it, by that I mean normal well-adjusted people with only casual relationships with the theory and practice of philanthropy, I can sense this inner conflict that I am extremely familiar with. It’s an unsettling ambivalence that anyone who is a critic of the sector knows very well, a recognition that philanthropy can be a force for social change—sometimes even anti-capitalist change—while being rooted in the most fucked up things about capitalism, namely the obscene reality that in a country where 1 in 10 households have been unable to feed themselves, a single individual can own, say, $200 billion.
I can almost see the chain reaction of thoughts happening where someone is like, wow I actually really like a lot of these groups that just got more money than they have probably ever had, so hang on a second, is this a really good thing? Do I like this billionaire? Do I like what is happening right now? But how can that be when I’m pretty sure I don’t like any billionaires at all and I definitely don’t like Amazon, the place where all this money is coming from.
This is the paradox of big philanthropy. Even when very rich people are giving away their money, even in the best way possible to the most important things, it’s still often reinforcing this plutocratic order that led to the accumulation of their wealth in the first place. It happens either through unfair tax breaks (the charitable tax deduction benefits the wealthy more than the rest of us) or through reinforcing this false narrative that accumulation of private wealth is the best way to meet the public’s needs. And yet, there are all of these pools of wealth and all of these causes that need money, right?
So if you are conflicted by the windfall of funding MacKenzie Scott is sending to hundreds of important, underfunded causes, you are not alone. All of these impulses are simultaneously valid. But I would also say there’s one very good reason to like Scott’s unusual philanthropic project, and it is kind of hard to put into words but I will try. And that is, I suspect she is the first billionaire megadonor who has figured out how to give away staggering sums of money, while sitting atop a hoard of even more money, but still managing to undermine instead of reinforce the system that provided her with that money in the first place. At least at the scale at which she’s operating.
It’s a remarkable kind of magic trick that to my thinking is what truly sets what she’s doing apart, whether it’s intentional or not. In other words, the best thing about MacKenzie Scott’s giving is that she is the rare billionaire donor who makes other billionaires and even the very concept of being a billionaire look terrible.
OK maybe not the best thing and definitely not the only good thing about Scott’s philanthropy. She is funding causes at a scale that is hard to overstate, in a way that has never really been done before. One way to put this into perspective is that in less than one year, she has given away $8.5 billion. The country’s largest institutional funder, the Gates Foundation, gives away about $5 billion a year, and to do so, relies on a staff of 1,600 employees. Scott has zero staff other than a mysterious team of advisors (more on that in a bit), and seemed to ramp up giving beyond that of Gates in no time at all. She has shattered the philanthropic truism that giving away money is hard, and that it requires the smarts and savvy of the wealthy people who earned it in order to direct it in an effective manner.
That’s true in the amount she gives, but also in the execution. Some 90% of typical philanthropic giving is restricted, meaning it can only be used for express purposes, often very limited projects that the donor wants to see happen. So it’s less like giving someone money and more like subcontracting with grantees to carry out a donor’s whims. Scott’s giving is all unrestricted. Recipients can do whatever they want with it.
Also, many of the recipients are very small, under-resourced organizations. Another paternalistic norm she has broken is the common practice for funders to only give money in proportion to the group’s current budget. In other words, if I have a budget of $100,000 a year, I might only get a grant of $5,000. If I have a budget in the millions, I could get millions. That might sound like it makes some sense, after all, you don’t want someone to be so reliant on one grant. But what it effectively does is institutionalize inequality in the nonprofit sector. Small groups stay small. Big groups get bigger. Scott has no such rule, showering tiny nonprofits with amounts that are in some cases are probably more than they’ve received to date.
The latest round of giving went to 286 groups totaling $2.7 billion, averaging $9.5 million per group. Not all recipients received that much, but a look at the list of grantees reveals organizations that are not accustomed to receiving funding anywhere near that amount. Scott also puts a focus on groups led by women and people of color, which typically receive far less funding than large, mostly white NGOs. A brief sampling of the new recipients include Favianna Rodriguez’s Center for Cultural Power, Nick Tilsen’s NDN Collective, Boston-based Afro-Latin power building group the Hyde Square Task Force, the Black-led Movement Fund, the American Indian College Fund, Latinx dance troupe Ballet Hispanico, and so so many more.
So that’s great, right? Problem solved. Philanthropy figured out. Well, not really, because Scott’s giving is still problematic in ways that are common to all mega-donors and some ways that are unique to her own giving. Much of what these groups do shouldn’t even need to rely on private funding in the first place, much less one individual’s checking account. And what if you’re a very similar nonprofit as these groups and all of a sudden one peer has a budget that is many times larger than everyone else’s in the field? Why did that happen and what does that do within a movement? Meanwhile the process of how these decisions are being made is totally opaque. We don’t know who is making these calls, and it’s impossible to apply for funding.
There’s also the problem of Scott’s wealth itself, and whether it can ever truly be given away, the way this project has been framed. When she first announced her intention to “empty the safe” following her divorce from Bezos, Scott had around $36 billion. A year later, having given away $8.5 billion, she’s now worth $60 billion, thanks to surging Amazon stock. Wealth is so unbelievable sticky, such a black hole for more wealth, is it even possible to give away a fortune that size? Maybe, but I don’t know, and that’s why I’ve always been highly suspicious of the Giving Pledge and the overall concept of philanthropy as a means of large scale wealth distribution. It doesn’t really work.
So this puts Scott right in the dark heart of the paradox of big philanthropy. A reluctant billionaire who seems to not like the idea of being a billionaire, or the very idea of billionaires at all, but sees the tremendous need and impact she could have. At the same time, she runs the risk of becoming yet another Bill Gates, fueling the superhero myth of this class of people who stand above everyone else, swooping in with their riches to save the world.
But this is where I think Scott’s philanthropy gets really weird and really interesting. Through some combination of her writing about philanthropy (she is a novelist after all) and the news cycle-grabbing way she is doing it, Scott has managed to make the giving part look really good, and the wealth part look really bad.
In most cases, the typical narrative of billionaire philanthropy is, here I am, a person who has worked hard and done something remarkable and come into more money than I know what to do with as a result, and now using the talents that got me here, I will turn that excess into glorious charity. But there’s rarely much of an indication that the donor thinks there’s anything wrong with this arrangement. Scott, through words and action, is sending a very different message. It goes something like, What a ridiculous thing it is that I, or anyone really, would have this much money. Take it away. As Mike Scutari pointed out, that comes across more explicitly in her latest blog post than it has previously. Scott writes:
“Putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role. … We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.“
So she’s very openly criticizing the economic system that gave her her wealth, a very rare thing among donors. But perhaps even more impactful is the shock and awe that comes with the level of giving she’s doing, which has this weird emergent effect of demonstrating how ridiculous it is that people can own and then just give away this kind of money. From my perspective working in nonprofit media, I was flooded with many multimillion-dollar gift announcements all in one morning, an unusual occurrence. It was almost like someone had set the sprinklers off in a crowded, stuffy office building.
I don’t mean to elevate Scott into some kind of folk hero or revolutionary. At the end of the day, she’s a person with $60 billion in Amazon stock. I also don’t know if others are even having this same reaction—it’s possible people are mainly experiencing this as either the typical warm, fuzzy feeling or angry cynicism toward yet another rich person.
But I feel like it’s different than that. I think this rapid flurry of billions of dollars being given away, no catch, no limits, is having a more disruptive effect. It makes it difficult to ignore the absurdity of one person having this amount of wealth, and also reminds us that there are all of these other people out there who have similar hoards of money, who are clearly just sitting on it or counting it over and over again or tying it up in strategic planning processes or rolling around in it who knows.
There have always been wealthy people, often heirs, who come to the conclusion that they have too much money and that they don’t want it. But never with the scale and urgency of what we’re seeing here. It’s creating strange secondary impacts beyond that of the grants themselves. Intentionally or not, she’s creating a spectacle, an exaggerated caricature of wealth and mega-philanthropy that is somehow simultaneously outperforming and undermining the subject of its ridicule.
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Links. Cooking ourselves alive edition.
- “I feel like I’m in Hell.” The West is roasting and it’s not even summer. “And as bad as it might seem today, this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
- The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, called “unprecedented” and “alarming.”
- Burn units brace for surges as people come in contact with “superheated pavement.”
- Miami appointed a chief heat officer to contend with climate change’s “silent killer.”
- Salamanders are masters of surviving heat, drought, and wildfire, able to shut down for months or years at a time and some can cover themselves in a “protective mucus sheath.”
- The pandemic did nothing to slow climate change. “Carbon and methane concentrations in the atmosphere just reached their highest-known level in millions of years.”
- The United States cannot pass a climate bill to save our lives, but we’ve still made climate progress by way of a “green vortex,” which sounds a lot like a mix of catalytic cooperation and behavioral contagion.
- Native organizing wins and the Keystone XL pipeline is fuckin dead goodbye. Emily Atkin collected a list of times very serious people said the pipeline was inevitable.
- Bill Nye’s What I Can’t Live Without is predictably charming, especially his love of canned gin and tonics.
- A man drove his car into a crowd of protestors and killed a 32-year-old woman in Minneapolis. At least three states have passed laws softening penalties for people who hit protestors with a vehicle.
- For years, the indulgent gig economy services used by city dwellers were being underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. That is coming to an end.
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Reading
I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, by Brandon Soderberg and Baynard Woods. Two Baltimore journalists tell the story of the Gun Trace Task Force in the Baltimore Police Department, a plainclothes unit run by supercop Wayne Jenkins that he operated as a de facto organized crime syndicate, even amid the heightened scrutiny following the police killing of Freddie Gray. I heard an interview with the authors who said they wanted to write a compelling True Crime book that didn’t valorize law enforcement the way they often do, and they definitely succeeded. It reads as both a page-turning thriller and a condemnation of the criminal legal system.
The antics of GTTF are truly jaw-dropping, but what makes the book really effective is its portrayal of a general atmosphere of lawlessness and abuse within a police department. It’s not just about the crimes of these particular cops, it’s the fact that the unfettered power given to police makes it more or less within each cop’s own discretion just how corrupt they would like to be, with little accountability so long as you don’t get too greedy and make it onto the feds’ radar. Even supposed reform efforts like body cams are turned into tools of corruption, initially making cops more cautious, until they realized how to stage cam footage to cover up abuses.
Also all kinds of wild legal quirks, like the ease with which cops can listen to jailed suspects’ phone conversations, and the fact that you can have your property seized by police and never get it back, even if you are never charged. And, of course, all the dirty tricks like planting drugs and guns, dropping BB guns at crime scenes to justify force, blocking in cars without probable cause by driving against one way traffic, causing car crashes during pursuit and abandoning the scene, robbing cars and houses and reselling seized drugs, and mysterious deaths of people who crossed cops. It’s basically The Shield but it’s all real.
A must read for anyone who is concerned about policing in America, or you just enjoy a ripping crime story.
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Listening
A friend of mine recently put out a solo instrumental record called Paths, recording under the name Tewksbury, and it’s really good I’ve been listening to it a lot lately. Seems to be doing pretty well too. Doug lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he’s a communications professor teaching on media studies, culture, technology, and social justice. He describes Paths as being about “climate change and trying to find hope in these dark times for our planet.” The longest track, Viscosity, is based on Thomas Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, which I wrote about back in CP63.
If you like experimental or minimalist instrumental music, like Max Richter or Nils Frahm or Jon Hopkins or are just feeling contemplative I think you’ll really like it, you can stream on all the platforms and purchase on Bandcamp.
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Watching
Film festival is over. Hacks on HBO. It’s very funny, sometimes sad, and has occasional social commentary on topics like gender roles, generational divides, and wealth inequality and also how totally fuckin weird Las Vegas is. Highly recommend.
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Sorry I didn’t tell you guys that I was taking a skip week last week I took the end of the week off so that ~*my wife*~ and I could go spend a couple of days in Northampton, Massachusetts staying in this inn that used to be a textile mill. Then we went to her cousin’s wedding which was the first big gathering I’ve been to since the you know what. I even bought a new outfit which was fun because it meant not wearing a t-shirt and basketball shorts which I wear way too often for someone who doesn’t play basketball.
At the wedding, which was in the Merrimack Valley which will either mean something to you or it won’t, a fellow guest said to me, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like, what the fuck’s his name, from the royal family. Harry.” I said oh thank you no I’ve never heard that. Then later I heard the same person say to another guest, “Doesn’t he look like Prince Harry?” and that guest said, “Yeah but I don’t think that should be taken as a compliment.” Which is some cold shit but honestly I’ll take Harry any day because these days I’m looking more and more like William if you know what I mean.
Anyway it was a nice trip and I think YOU look like either a prince or a princess whichever you prefer, and one of the good-looking ones who is not racist.
Tate