The Challenges of Mark Zuckerberg's Hope to Eradicate Poverty - The Atlantic

The Challenges of Mark Zuckerberg's Hope to Eradicate Poverty - The Atlantic:

The Shortcomings of Billionaire Philanthropy
Wealthy moguls have historically thwarted efforts to eradicate poverty despite their contributions. Will Mark Zuckerberg’s newly announced initiative suffer from the same pattern?

The Internet erupted this week when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, published a letter to their newborn daughter, pledging to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares (currently worth $45 billion) to charity.

Zuckerberg and Chan cover a lot of ground in their letter, including an inspiring desire to eradicate poverty. “If our generation connects [the world’s population], we can lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty,” it reads. On this front, they’ve largely penned a manifesto in support of health and education. But wealthy moguls embraced similar priorities roughly a century ago—and Zuckerberg and Chan may very well be replicating their mistakes.

Magnates in the early 20th century were hardly crusaders for economic justice. Rather, wealthy businessmen opposed nearly every significant effort to ameliorate poverty, from relatively modest proposals to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wide-ranging New Deal. Indeed, history shows that one can champion health and education without addressing poverty at all.

The United States was still in the throes of the industrial revolution in the early 20th century. Factories were spreading rapidly, exploding in size and number. Wages were abysmally low, workdays gruelingly long, and factories incredibly dangerous. Bouts of unemployment remained commonplace for working-class Americans. So did destitution in old age. In urban America, the cauldron of industrialization, disease and overcrowding were rampant.

Americans famously worried that these trends were tearing the nation apart. Many of them fought to save the United States from the excesses of industrial capitalism. What is commonly overlooked, however, is that industrial capitalists themselves joined this fight with health and education among their main points of attack.

In Detroit, for example, automobile executives led the charge to build parks and playgrounds across the city in the years surrounding World War I. Detroit’s mayor at the time—a multimillionaire and former executive at Ford—appropriated large sums to fund the effort. In the minds of business leaders, parks and playgrounds promised to provide healthy, wholesome, and safe recreational outlets in a city filled with debasing temptations. Distraught that countless Detroiters were “huddled together in small rooms ... robbed of normal home life,” the wealthy mayor and his business-friendly administration made The Challenges of Mark Zuckerberg's Hope to Eradicate Poverty - The Atlantic: