HOW THE GATES FOUNDATION REFLECTS THE GOOD AND THE BAD OF “HACKER PHILANTHROPY”
IT’S ELECTION SEASON, and teams of journalists are avidly tracking the flow of big money into political campaigns. Sifting financial records and filings, they are laying bare the activities of Super PACs, 501(c)(4)s, and campaign committees. There’s a parallel realm of big-money activity, however, that receives much less attention: philanthropy. With the explosion of the billionaire class, the number of deep-pocketed donors and foundations has mushroomed as well. Many of the new benefactors are Wall Street and Silicon Valley moguls who are seeking to apply to social and economic problems the same zest for innovation and entrepreneurship that they showed in their business ventures.
The creed of these new philanthropists was brashly outlined in June by Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook, in anarticle appearing in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Philanthropy for Hackers.” Traditional philanthropy, he declared, is “a strange and alien world made up of largely antiquated institutions.” These old-timers have long favored “safe” gifts to well-established institutions, “resulting in a never-ending competition to name buildings at major universities, medical centers, performing arts centers and other such public places.” The new breed, by contrast, has a hacker mindset: It is anti-establishment, believes in “radical transparency,” is given to problem solving, and has an ability to identify weaknesses in long-established systems and to disrupt them. With this “hacker elite” now seeking to upend philanthropy, Parker exhorted them to resist the urge to institutionalize and instead treat philanthropy as “a series of calculated risks” and “big bets.” In a bid to put these principles into practice, Parker launched a foundation bearing his name, with an endowment of $600 million and a commitment to finding new ways to fight allergies, malaria, and cancer.
Interestingly, there are two members of the hacker elite who for 15 years now have practiced this style of philanthropy in a big way: Bill and Melinda Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is by far the largest such institution in the world. Its assets of $41 billion are more than double the combined assets of the “Big Three” foundations — Ford ($12 billion), Rockefeller ($4 billion), and Carnegie ($3 billion). The Gates Foundation has all the traits Parker extols, and its work has served as a sort of grand experiment in the new “venture philanthropy,” as it’s sometimes called.
Gates is the largest philanthropic supporter of primary and secondary education in the United States. Together with the Walton Family Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, it has helped reshape national education policy. Gates has been no less influential in international public health. Over the last 15 years, it has spent billions of dollars to fight polio, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases. Though the World Health Organization spends more than Gates does on health, the foundation, by virtue of its high profile and skillful marketing, has played a key part in setting the global health agenda. On top of it all, the foundation in recent years has invested heavily in agricultural development in Africa, joining with the Rockefeller Foundation to build on the “Green Revolution” that Rockefeller helped launch after World War II. Not since that earlier initiative has a foundation left such a large imprint on the world as the Gates Foundation.
Despite its impact, few book-length assessments of the foundation’s work have appeared. Now Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Essex, is seeking to fill the gap. “Just how efficient is Gates’s philanthropic spending?” she asks in No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “Are the billions he has spent on U.S. primary and secondary schools improving education outcomes? Are global health grants directed at the largest health killers? Is the Gates Foundation improving access to affordable medicines, or are patent rights How the Gates Foundation Reflects the Good and the Bad of “Hacker Philanthropy”:
