Felix Salmon

The thing that struck me first about Bloomberg’s new updated-daily Billionaires Index was the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are still in second and third place, respectively. Aren’t they both supposed to have given most of their money to the Gates Foundation? How can they give it all away and yet still be among the world’s richest people?

Ben Walsh looked into this for me, and it turns out that Gates and Buffett have pledged to give most of their money to the Gates Foundation. But they haven’t actually done so, yet.

The Buffett gift is the more transparent of the two: the terms of the gift are laid out in a public letter written in admirably clear English. Buffett basically set aside 10 million B shares in June 2006, and promised to donate 5% of those shares to the Gates Foundation every year. The idea is that although the number of shares being donated each year will fall by 5%, share-price appreciation will keep the annual value of the gift roughly constant, or even rising, over time.

The B shares had a 50-for-1 stock split in January 2010, so the Buffett gift was of 500 million shares at their current valuation of $81.34 each. That’s $40.7 billion. To date, Buffett has donated 132 million shares, with a cumulative value of $9.5 billion. Buffett insists that the shares be sold and the proceeds spent, so it’s silly to look at what those 132 million shares are worth today. But it’s certainly safe to assume that if he hadn’t given those shares away, they would not have been sold — and the current value of 132 million shares is $10.8 billion.

As a result, we can say that were it not for Buffett’s gift to the Gates Foundation, his net worth would be $10.8 billion higher: $55.9 billion, rather than $45.1 billion. Amazingly, that eleven-figure increase in net worth would make no difference to his ranking on the Bloomberg index: he’d still be in third place, behind Gates’s $63.4 billion.

On the other hand, if you subtract from Buffett’s net worth the 368 million shares he has irrevocably committed, then he drops from $45.1 billion to $15.2 billion. That’s still a completely insane amount of money for any one individual to have, but it would place him just 46th on the Forbes billionaires list, between a Russian steel magnate and a Russian nickel magnate.

So while Buffett’s gift has had the effect of reducing his spendable net worth from $55.9 billion to $15.2 billion, a 73% decrease, it has so far had the effect of reducing his billionaire-league-table status by a much smaller $10.8 billion, or 19%.

And what about Gates? He has donated $28 billion to his eponymous donation to date, which to a first approximation means that his net worth would be a whopping $91.4 billion if he hadn’t given that money away. That would make him the world’s richest man by a very comfortable margin.

What’s less clear is the amount of money that Gates has pledged to give to his foundation in the future. In their Giving Pledge letter, the Gateses say that “we have committed the vast majority of our assets to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”, but that’s pretty much all the specificity I’ve been able to find. What we do know is that the gifts they’ve made already have reduced Bill’s net worth by roughly 30%.

All of which is to say that the net-worth numbers on billionaire league tables are decidedly silly, since they include enormous sums which have been pledged but not formally donated. Insofar as billionaires are competitive — and, to a first approximation, all self-made billionaires are competitive in such matters — then maybe it would make more sense for the people putting these league tables together to use the sum of current net worth and the amount that has been given to charity. There are lots of people who want to be the richest man in the world, and there’s nothing embarrassing about appearing on this league table. Nothing, that is, which might encourage its members to give more of their money away.

If I were Gates or Buffett, then, and wanted to encourage my fellow billionaires to give their money away, I’d set up some structure which resulted in all my committed funds being subtracted from my net worth. We’re so used to seeing those two names on the top of every billionaires list that it would be something of a salutary shock to see them disappear from the league tables overnight, as a result of doing something incredibly praiseworthy. And it would also make the rest of us realize how silly these league tables really are.

When Mitt Romney started plugging his friend’s for-profit university as a solution to the problem of rising higher-education costs, he was surely doing well by a major campaign donor, while giving pretty bad advice to potential students: no one should enroll in an $81,000 21-month program in “video game art” if it has — as this one does — a graduation rate of just 38%.

But Romney’s staking out an important philosophical stance here, too, when he praises the for-profit education industry in general as an affordable alternative to traditional colleges.

How can a company which exists to maximize the profits for its shareholders, and therefore to extract as much money as it possibly can from its students, possibly cost less than a traditional college which is run on a not-for-profit basis and which might well have a substantial endowment subsidizing tuition fees? Most traditional colleges charge some students nothing at all, while at the extreme, Cooper Union has a flat tuition rate of zero. For-profit colleges can’t possibly compete with that.

For-profit colleges have a fiduciary obligation to, basically, take the money and run: once they’ve been paid their tuition fee, they’ve made their money, whether the student continues to show up for class or not. But still, there are two main ways in which they could, at least in theory, compete on price with traditional colleges.

The first is to take advantage of their high drop-out rates, and use the drop-outs’ tuition fees to effectively cross-subsidize the minority of students who actually finish the course. After all, if half your students have stopped showing up for class, they’re not going to cost you much money. The average student will still suffer, of course, but at least those who finish the course might benefit.

The other way that for-profit colleges can end up cheaper than their traditional competitors is by concentrating on costs: rather than paying enormous sums for prestigious professors and research institutes, they concentrate with a laser focus on their core business of teaching undergrads. After all, their concentration on profits means that they’re likely to be more efficient than flabby old traditional not-for-profits. Think of it this way: groceries are cheaper at Walmart than they are at the Park Slope Food Coop.

But does that hold more generally? If you have a for-profit and a not-for-profit in the same space, is the for-profit likely to be cheaper and more efficient? I’ve been wondering about that question myself of late, ever since I had breakfast with Betterment CEO Jon Stein a couple of weeks ago. I’d just written something less-than-flattering about the fees that he charges, comparing them unflatteringly to those charged by Vanguard, and he told me that it’s incredibly hard to even think about competing on fees with Vanguard when you’re a for-profit company and Vanguard is mutualized.

That rang true to me — but it’s also something I wanted to check out for myself. There’s no doubt that Vanguard funds have historically been much cheaper than other funds, but to what extent is that just a function of the fact that they’re index funds, and index funds by their nature are cheaper things than actively-managed mutual funds? Certainly if you look at Vanguard’s ETFs, there’s not much evidence that they’re any cheaper than their direct for-profit competitors.

And what happens in other areas where not-for-profit organizations compete directly with for-profits? Hospitals, of course, are one — are non-profit hospitals measurably more efficient than their for-profit brethren? Credit unions are another; the banking lobby isn’t shy about keeping their operations restricted on the more or less explicit grounds that it’s not fair for for-profit banks to have to compete with mutualized credit unions. And in fact consumer-facing credit unions are, nearly always, much better value for depositors and borrowers than the big banks are.

One useful distinction here, I think, comes from Larry Summers, who talks about how a huge part of the US economy is now accounted for by non-traded goods, where the normal rules of competition become harder to discern. “In many of these areas the traditional case for market capitalism is weaker”, he writes, adding that “it is surely not an accident that in almost every society the production of health care and education is much more involved with the public sector than the production of manufactured goods.”

Summers concludes that “it is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least—those concerned with health, education and social protection–that are in most need of reinvention.” Unhelpfully, he gives no hint as to what kind of reinvention he has in mind, or whether he thinks that for-profit companies can do these things better or more efficiently than not-for-profit institutions.

But I do think that it behooves Obamacrats like Summers to engage directly with the facile certainties of Mitt Romney when it comes to things like this. For-profit colleges are not a better and cheaper alternative to traditional colleges; in fact, their shareholder focus by definition means that they don’t have their students’ best interests at heart.

Instead of pushing back, however, the Obama Administration technocrats love to talk about what they can learn from the private sector, and talk about public-private partnerships (where “private” always means “for profit”), and generally give the impression that even if they disapprove of individual for-profit colleges or healthcare companies, in principle they think such things are a swell idea.

Ideally what I’d like to see is some empirical data here: where do for-profits compete effectively with not-for-profits? Where don’t they? And if that particular distinction turns out not to be very useful in some of these areas, then what are the kinds of things we should be looking for instead?

I know full well that a lot of not-for-profit organizations are run in a dreadful fashion; I’m just not convinced that introducing a profit motive is always or even often the best way to fix that problem. Sometimes it might be: I’m thinking for instance about the way that American Homeowner Preservation, in Chicago, spun off a for-profit hedge fund in order to raise the kind of money which could buy up whole portfolios of distressed mortgages at a stroke. But I very much doubt that for-profit education is ever a good idea. I just don’t see how the incentives there could possibly be aligned.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review is hosting a debate over philanthrocapitalism in which Kavita Ramdas, on the anti-philanthrocapitalist side, makes some very salient points.

Firstly, Ramdas breaks philanthropy down into three groups: traditional philanthropies; philanthrocapitalism; and what she calls “social change philanthropies”, which “are emerging to challenge the substance, form, and direction of philanthrocapitalism as well as the current, largely unequal systems of trade and global capitalism”.

Ramdas doesn’t give examples of these anti-capitalist social change philanthropies, so I’m a bit unclear on what exactly she has in mind, although Occupy Wall Street and its funders certainly seem to count. And interestingly, although Ramdas is siding with the social-change philanthropies against the philanthrocapitalists, the philanthrocapitalists, in the form of Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, seem more interested in opposing traditional philanthropies:

We still need to talk about nonprofit performance and impact. Most nonprofits are “black boxes” to their supporters. We are excited that the Internet and social media can engage and mobilize “mass philanthrocapitalism” from ordinary donors. Organizations such as GlobalGiving, Kiva, and DonorsChoose have made a great start, but this revolution has a long way to go. And we mean revolution, maybe even a mass extinction of traditional nonprofits that cannot engage their givers.

Although I have no desire to overthrow the capitalist system, I have a lot of sympathy with Ramdas, here, and very little with the philanthrocapitalists. The idea that a “black box” is always and obviously a Bad Thing is oversimplistic: while transparency and accountability are good, they can result in conservatism and a lack of the very kind of risk appetite and failure-embracing that the philanthrocapitalists love to espouse.

Meanwhile, Ramdas has a strong point here:

Current philanthropic practice is also driven by the need to find technological solutions, the same “fix-the-problem” mentality that allowed business people to succeed as hedge-fund managers, capital-market investors, or software-developers. This approach is designed to yield measurable and fairly quick solutions. A symptom of this may be found in the kind of skills that new foundations are seeking. I am struck by how few social scientists are employed at the new “mega-philanthropies.” Instead, the people most sought after are management consultants, business people, former industry leaders or lobbyists, and scientists. Each of these is expected to bring a crisp and coolly efficient approach to their work, demonstrating their “expertise” on specific issues—climate change, agricultural productivity, soil quality, or infectious disease. The nuance and inherent humility of the social sciences—the realization that development has to do with people, with human and social complexity, with cultural and traditional realities, and their willingness to struggle with the messy and multifaceted aspects of a problem—have no cachet in this metrics-driven, efficiency-seeking, technology-focused approach to social change.

Pointedly, Ramdas asks for — and the philanthrocapitalists fail to provide — “evidence that philanthrocapitalism works”. When the Gates Foundation, armed with a million-dollar salary for its new CEO, ends up hiring a second Microsoft centimillionaire, the simplest explanation is usually the right one: it’s not because that person, at that salary, is the best possible choice for the foundation. It’s just that extraordinarily rich people, like everybody else, like familiar surroundings. And they’re also disproportionately likely to have an immodestly high opinion of their own ability to be a success in any field they choose. If they hired management consultants as a tool to make lots of money, then why not hire management consultants as a tool to give it away?

There’s a lot of this which can’t and won’t be changed. Philanthropy is driven by money, and money comes from rich people. If it’s rich people who are paying the philanthropic piper, then it’s rich people who will call the philanthropic tune. And non-profit organizations which don’t pay the requisite lip service when it comes to return on investment and the like will simply get passed over, when the dollars are doled out, in favor of fundraisers who can talk the talk.

I have little reason to believe that the rich are better at giving away money than the poor, or that they run philanthropies better. But this is how rich people like to give away their money, these days — and it’s better that they give it away than that they don’t. I think they have a lot to learn from philanthropies which have been around for decades, but they’ll have to learn that themselves, slowly. In the mean time, we don’t need to celebrate philanthrocapitalism in order to be happy that the rich are choosing to give their money away, rather than just keep it in their families forever.

Robert Frank — the WSJ writer, not the Cornell economist — had a fascinating column about what he calls “wealth beta” this weekend. If you’re a member of the 1%, it turns out, you don’t just have a lot of money; you’re also likely to be seeing a huge amount of volatility in your wealth and your income. And this volatility has been measured according to the familiar scale where the broad stock market has a beta of 1:

The new rich have become the high-betas of our economy. With their dependence on financial markets, their leverage and their hyperspending, the top 1% have income swings that now are more than twice as high as those of the rest of the population.

A study by Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen of Northwestern University found that the beta of the top 1% nearly quadrupled between 1982 and 2007 to 2.39. The top 0.01% had a beta of 3.96, making even the riskiest tech stocks look safe by comparison. Economists and wealth managers say the betas of the rich have likely soared even higher in recent months as markets gyrated sharply.

Frank’s column is based pretty unquestioningly on the idea that this is a bad thing, and he quotes a few wealth-management executives talking about how very rich people can stay rich for decades, and avoid losing all their money.

But my feeling is that high-beta wealth is something to be celebrated — it’s one of the few silver linings to the current rise in inequality. People might become stupendously wealthy, but we’re not really creating a new class of dynasts here. Instead, the money comes, and then, almost as fast as it came, it goes.

One reason is just that the idea of preserving wealth in one’s own family for many generations to come has rather gone out of fashion. If you inherit a fortune which has been in your family for hundreds of years, then you do generally feel a responsibility for maintaining it and passing it on to future generations. But families are smaller now than they used to be, and self-made billionaires don’t necessarily consider multi-generational wealth preservation as a particularly top priority. Indeed, it’s more common to see billionaires swing the other way: Warren Buffett, for instance, likes to say that he wants to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing”.

And some billionaires, of course, are childless, which means they can and should do exactly what they want with their money. They’re basically forced to give it away to charity, since it’s pretty much impossible to spend that kind of money.

The fact is that if you’re hugely wealthy, you’ll almost certainly live very well for the rest of your life no matter how much of your money you risk and lose. Short of going to jail, the rich very rarely find themselves completely impoverished. And in any case, self-made plutocrats tend to have extremely healthy egos: they’re confident that if they lose everything, they’d be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and do it all over again.

Wealth, at these stratospheric levels, is a way of measuring who’s winning the game; if it’s not rising, you’re not winning. And of course the things that Frank prescribes — like taking on less debt and diversifying your holdings — tend to go directly against the very strategies which created all that wealth in the first place.

We live in a world where millions of people are pursuing dreams and careers which have some small chance of being hugely successful. The number of people who have a chance of achieving such success has never been greater — and when it arrives, that success is increasingly lucrative for those who get there. That’s the game; its winners change from year to year and decade to decade. But the glory goes only to the person who makes the money, not to anybody who inherits it — unless they, too, display a similar knack.

So let’s not encourage the uber-wealthy to squirrel away their money and keep it in their families. It’s a good thing that today’s wealth has high velocity and that if it doesn’t get lost in the marketplace it’s more likely than ever to end up somewhere philanthropic. Even if that frustrates executives at private banks and wealth management companies.

Jeffrey Goldberg is on something of an anti-Walmart campaign — and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. There’s a lot of things to dislike about Walmart, including the fact, as Goldberg notes in his latest Bloomberg View column, that its stores don’t have windows. But having decided that he doesn’t like Walmart, Goldberg is attacking the company and its founding family on grounds which don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For instance, take this seemingly damning statistic from Goldberg’s column:

In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion, according to Forbes.

This sounds outrageous, until you stop for a second and take note of the fact that Jeffrey Goldberg, individually, has a net worth greater than the bottom 25% of all Americans.

According to the latest data we have, 24.8% of American households had zero or negative net worth — add them all together, and you get zero. Jeffrey Goldberg’s net worth, it’s safe to say, is greater than zero. And while it’s definitely a bad thing that one in four Americans have no net worth at all, I don’t think you can really blame Walmart for that. Indeed, Walmart saves money for poor Americans — while it might not be a great employer, there are many more poor Americans than there are poor Walmart employees. From a financial perspective, Walmart has been a decidedly positive force in terms of bringing down the cost of living for those on extremely limited budgets.

Goldberg’s thoughts, on the other hand, are in a higher place. The main subject of his column is the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville — a museum which Goldberg (or at least his headline writer) considers “a moral blight”.

What makes Goldberg say that? Well, while the museum itself is beautiful, he says, and contains much beautiful art, the “American landscape has been systematically disfigured by thousands of hangar-sized warehouses bearing the Wal-Mart name”.

This might be true — although to be honest I can’t recall ever seeing a Walmart erected anywhere particularly beautiful; they tend to pop up, in my experience, in vast and dreary expanses of exurbia. But even if Walmart is a beauty-destroying monster, that hardly makes Crystal Bridges equally monstrous.

Warming to his theme, Goldberg notes that the messages of Norman Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter” and Jacob Lawrence’s “Ambulance Call” stands in contrast to, respectively, the way that Walmart treats its female employees, and the way in which it’s denying many of them healthcare coverage.

Does Goldberg celebrate the fact that these messages are being displayed for perpetuity in the town where Walmart has its headquarters, and might somehow serve to remind Walmart’s executives of the broader American context in which they’re making their decisions? He does not. Instead, he thinks that this art does not deserve to be in Bentonville at all:

I’m not begrudging Alice Walton her inherited wealth. What I am begrudging are her priorities. Walton has the influence to help Wal-Mart workers, especially women, earn more money and gain access to affordable health care.

But her response so far to the needs of the people whose sweat pays for her paintings is a simple one: Let them eat art.

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Firstly, it’s not clear that Alice Walton does have a lot of influence within Walmart’s senior managerial ranks. Could Walton really help Wal-Mart’s workers earn more money and get better healthcare? Maybe she could; I’m not convinced. But here’s the thing: in what way does building a beautiful museum prevent her from doing just that? The only way, it seems to me, is if we’re in some kind of a zero-sum game, here, where the alternative to building the museum would be for Walton to take the money she would otherwise have spent on Crystal Bridges, and give it directly to Walmart workers.

Except, Goldberg says quite explicitly that he doesn’t begrudge Walton her wealth. Does he want her to give it away or not?

Let’s say that Walton has spent a total of $1 billion on this museum. According to its latest annual report, Walmart has 2.1 million “associates”: if you shared $1 billion between them, that would be an investment of $476 apiece in giving them more money and better healthcare on an ongoing basis. Even if you could somehow manage to use 10% of that value every year on a sustainable basis, that’s less than a buck a week.

Walmart is a public company, now — it’s owned by hundreds of thousands of individual and institutional shareholders. (Goldberg himself is probably a beneficial shareholder somehow, through a pension plan or insurance policy somewhere.) Walmart has been good to Alice Walton, and she’s giving back to Bentonville and to America by building a fine museum in a part of the country which is relatively starved for cultural goodness. Her impulses and her museum are admirable, whatever you think of Walmart.

When the East Coast liberal elite, in the form of Jeffrey Goldberg, sneers at Walton’s generosity and calls her museum a moral blight, that only serves to make us seem even more elitist and out of touch. It’s pretty clear that Goldberg would have preferred Asher Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” to have remained in New York, rather than being moved to Bentonville — maybe we have finer aesthetic sensibilities up here, and therefore the painting would be better housed in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. I’m sure that Stephen A. Schwarzman, for one, would like that.

But Arkansas is America too. And it’s fantastic that a wide range of exciting American art — including the likes of Jenny Holzer and Kara Walker — is being displayed in the heart of Red State America. Well done to Alice Walton for making that happen. Arkansas is a better place, now, thanks to Crystal Bridges, and Walton deserves our thanks. Not brickbats.

Eric Lichtblau has a depressing, must-read story today detailing how strong government regulation of the for-profit eduction sector was diluted into toothlessness by effective lobbying. Lobbyists, of course, trade on their access to politicians. And one way that they obtain that access surprised me — although it clearly didn’t surprise Lichtblau, who dropped it into his story in a subordinate clause with nary a raised eyebrow. Here it is with my emphasis:

Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who has led Congressional hearings into the colleges, got into a heated exchange with Mr. Stein, the Education Corporation investor.

The senator said that during a hallway conversation after lunch in the Senate dining room, Mr. Stein promised to “make life rough for me” if Mr. Harkin kept up his attacks.

“I took it as a threat — it was one of the most blatant comments ever made to me in my years in the Senate,” Mr. Harkin said.

Mr. Stein, a frequent Democratic donor who had bought the lunch with the senator at a charity auction, would not discuss the details of the conversation. But he said Mr. Harkin’s account was “totally incorrect”.

I’m sure that nothing illegal happened here, but it seems ethically well over the line to me. For one thing, Harkin is rich even by Senate standards: with an eight-figure net worth, he’s the 17th-richest member of the chamber. If he wants to support a certain charity, he’s more than capable of writing a check, rather than selling his own availability to any lobbyist who wants to bend his ear for an hour.

(Technically, Avy Stein is a private-equity investor who owns a network of schools called Education Corporation of America; he’s not a registered lobbyist. But that, of course, makes no difference.)

My point is that it would be obviously unethical and possibly illegal for Harkin to simply sell his lunch hours to anybody willing to pay his price. But isn’t that effectively what he’s doing here? Yes, the money went to charity rather than directly to Harkin. But the point is that Harkin got something he values greatly in return for his time, and it shouldn’t really matter if a politician is paid in cash or in kind.

According to Alex Knott, lobbyists — among whom Stein isn’t even included — made six donations in Harkin’s honor in 2010, adding up to a total of $218,000.

I don’t know how much Harkin and his wife donate to charity each year, but it’s surely more than nothing. And every time they donate a dollar to charity, they’re making the clearest possible statement that they would rather that charity have that dollar than hold on to it themselves. As a result, if you donate money to one of Harkin’s favorite charities, you can consider that your donation has roughly as much value to him as if you’d given the money to him directly.

Even if you apply a generous discount rate and assume that Harkin would personally prefer cash to a charitable donation in his name, the donation is still worth something to him. He might prefer $10,000 in cash to a $10,000 donation on his behalf, for instance, but he wouldn’t prefer $1,000 in cash to a $10,000 donation to a favored charity. And so you can consider that a $10,000 donation is worth at least $1,000 to Harkin.

Which raises the question: if you wouldn’t be allowed to give $1,000 to Harkin personally, how is it OK to tie a $10,000 donation to some quid pro quo with him? (I have no idea how much Stein paid for his lunch, but I assume it was a substantial amount.)

This is an ethical issue I’ve faced myself. Every so often I’m invited to give a talk somewhere, with a fee attached, and I’d happily give the talk even if there wasn’t a fee. If I ask them to donate the fee to charity, does that eradicate the kind of conflict that would be seen if I accepted a check? I don’t think it does, entirely. On the other hand, if I give the talk and I don’t ask them to donate the fee to charity, I feel as though I’ve missed an opportunity to support a great organization.

Normally I say that I won’t accept a fee, but that I invite them to donate the sum to Doctors Without Borders; they don’t have to tell me whether they did or not. It’s a not-entirely-satisfactory compromise. But then again, I’m just a pundit. For US Senators, the bar should be set high. And if you wouldn’t sell your availability for cash, you shouldn’t do it for a favored charity, either.

David Kocieniewski has a long article about Ronald Lauder as sophisticated consumer of tax-avoidance advice, who has managed to become worth somewhere north of $3 billion even as he’s given away hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes. (In 1988 he was worth less than $250 million; he inherited a lot of money from his mother in 2004, but today his stake in Estee Lauder constitutes only about one fifth of his net worth.)

Kocieniewski’s article raises a salient question: should the tax deduction for charitable contributions be abolished, capped, or otherwise profoundly reworked? President Obama’s jobs bill includes an idea he’s been unsuccessfully pushing ever since he became president: that the deduction for charitable giving be capped at 28%, even if your top marginal tax rate is 35%. According to a recent paper from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, this modest tweak to the tax code would produce about $20 billion per year for the public fisc, while reducing total charitable giving by about $2 billion per year. That seems like a great idea to me, whether or not the government uses some of the proceeds to support the worthy charities which lose out.

Among those worthy charities, however, I would not include the Neue Galerie. It seems that Lauder has not actually donated his $135 million portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to the gallery; if and when he does, however, he’ll be able to deduct the full amount from his taxes at the top marginal rate of 35%, and thereby reduce his tax bill by more than $47 million. (If he can persuade the IRS that the painting has risen in value since he bought it, the deduction would be worth more still.)

Put another way, the government will spend $47 million so that Ronald Lauder can transfer a painting from his own ownership to that of a museum he controls. The painting doesn’t even need to be moved into the museum: it’s there already, and has been there since the day the museum opened. As far as the public and the art world are concerned, nothing will have changed — but as far as Lauder is concerned, he has a “reduce your tax bill by $47 million any time you need to” card just sitting in his back pocket.

There is very little public policy served by giving Lauder such a card. At the margin, does it make him more likely to open up a lovely museum of early 20th Century German and Austrian art in a Fifth Avenue mansion? Possibly. But the connection is tenuous enough that it’s hard to have any conviction in. And two things are undeniable: no one but Ronald Lauder will ever donate a $100 million painting to the Neue Galerie; and Ronald Lauder will never donate his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to anybody else. No matter what happens to the tax code.

What we have right now is a situation where non-profit organizations, especially cultural ones like art galleries and museums, get very little direct government support — and when they do get direct government support, the Republican party in particular loves to rail against such expenditure as being fiscally irresponsible. On the other hand, private museums like the Neue Gallerie are the annual beneficiary of millions of dollars in federal tax expenditures which no one ever seems to question.

There are however hints that the tax-deduction sacred cow might finally be showing the first signs of weakness. Exhibit A: a curious column by Stephen Carter, in Bloomberg View, rattling off the parade of horribles that might happen if the deduction is eliminated.

Carter talks about — without citing or linking to any examples of — “the rising mania among politicians on both sides of the aisle to adopt a policy long popular within academic circles — either eliminating or severely restricting the charitable deduction, at least in the upper-income brackets”. Without any citations or links, it’s hard to know what he’s talking about, but I assume he’s not talking about the Obama proposal: reducing a deduction from 35% to 28% is not my idea of “severely restricting” anything, and if he was talking about an on-the-table presidential policy proposal, I’m sure his editors would have forced him to come out and say so.

In any case, color me enthusiastic about this idea, if indeed there is a “rising mania” for it. There are lots of public policy reasons why the federal government should encourage charitable giving — but I can’t think of any good reasons why that encouragement should be targeted especially at higher-income taxpayers. Generalizing wildly, the poor give to churches and the needy; the rich are much more likely to give to museums or concert halls or their own bespoke charitable trusts.

Carter is absolutely right that the funds donated to charity each year go to a very different set of places than the funds which are spent by the federal government, despite the fact that both are designed “to promote the general welfare”. In that sense, government can never replace charity.

But of course people wouldn’t stop giving to charity if the tax deduction went away — indeed, 70% of Americans don’t itemize their taxes at all. And there will still be plenty of millionaires and billionaires who want to save lives and/or put their names on hospital wings, or support their beloved local opera house, or help keep Central Park beautiful. The only important numbers here are the deltas: if the tax deduction went away, how much would charitable giving go down? And which charities would be hardest hit?

It’s hard to answer the first question with any specificity. But the second is easier to answer. Take a look at the $360,000 salary for the director of the Neue Galerie — or, for that matter, the $1.5 million paid to the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, or the other seven-figure salaries paid at non-profit hospitals, universities, and foundations. There’s a rich-people money-go-round here: Jeff Raikes of the Gates Foundation doesn’t need his million-dollar salary, but the foundation is paying it anyway, as a matter of principle, presumably to encourage other foundations to start paying similar sums. These 1% salaries aren’t being paid out of small-dollar donations from the masses; they’re being paid out of large-dollar donations from other members of the 1%. And there’s no good reason for the US tax code to encourage such things.

Richard Thaler has a smart take on all this:

Having decided that charitable giving is a worthy cause, the government subsidizes charitable gifts from certain households, and for those chosen to be part of the plan, every dollar donated to a charity is increased by a specified percentage. To qualify, taxpayers must have a substantial home mortgage; the subsidy rate increases with taxable income. Low-income taxpayers receive no subsidy, but donations from qualified high-income taxpayers are subsidized by as much as 40 percent — or more…

The tax subsidy rate should be the same for everyone. This means that rather than being a deduction from income, the subsidy should take the form of a tax credit, so that if you contribute $1,000 and the subsidy rate is 15 percent, your taxes would be reduced by $150. (Ideally this credit should be “refundable,” so it is payable even if your tax bill is zero or negative.)

Carter’s response to Thaler is to say that it’s “a solution that would, of course, ‘cost’ the government more” than it’s spending right now in tax expenditures on the charitable deduction. But again, he doesn’t explain why this should be the case; it’s certainly not self-evident. A universal, refundable 15% tax credit would be a lot more democratic than the current deduction, and allow all Americans to take advantage of it, rather than only the minority who itemize their taxes. And if it did indeed end up costing more than the current system, with its deductions of 35% or more, that would only go to prove how badly skewed towards the rich the current system is.

We’re getting nowhere with respect to deep reform of the tax code, but it’s back on the table, as it is during every presidential election campaign. If we’re serious about it, then we should start taking an ax not only to the mortgage-interest deduction but also to the charitable-donation deduction. Because every time I see reports of a family charitable trust which carefully makes only the minimum outlays each year, I wonder just how charitable a lot of these donations are.

And of course Bloomberg View has a very large dog in this fight: it’s based in the headquarters of the Bloomberg Foundation offices on 78th Street, which are by some margin the most lavish offices I’ve ever seen in my life. Mike Bloomberg has every right to spend as much money as he likes on his foundation. But there’s absolutely no reason why the rest of us should subsidize those expenditures.

I’ve been thinking a lot of late about brands and media — as have people like Noah Brier. If you want to build your brand online, the best way of doing so is not to rent media, but rather to own it. To use Noah’s distinction, you want a sustained product, rather than a temporary campaign. Here’s Noah:

How does this look? On the extreme end it’s BabyCenter, RedBull.com or AMEX OPEN Forum, those brands are so far out ahead of everyone else from a publishing standpoint it’s just amazing. And look at the value they’ve created for themselves: Their sites are big enough that other brands want to advertise on them to reach the audience they’ve amassed. Not necessarily the most important thing for the brand, but a pretty good statement about what they’ve accomplished.

Now what happens if your aims are a not selling baby stuff, or fizzy drinks, or financial products? In fact, what happens if your aims aren’t selling anything at all?In that case, you might not mind if someone else were doing the publishing, just as you managed to achieve your goals at the same time. Which brings me to a very interesting $2.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Guardian’s global development microsite for three years.

The Gates Foundation actually launched the site in 2010, spending an undisclosed sum to do so; the new grant keeps the site going for another three years. As part of the deal, every page in the site — be it blog post or news story — gets prominently branded with the Gates Foundation logo, right at the top of the column where all the editorial content goes. (In fact, the logo is significantly larger than the Guardian’s own logo at the top of the page, although the site looks and feels like the rest of the Guardian site, and lives at guardian.co.uk.)

From an old-media perspective, this is a fantastic deal for the Guardian, which retains full editorial control:

The world’s news organisations can no longer rely solely on advertising and sales revenues. So, as we look beyond traditional sources of funding, the backing of third parties who are willing to support our journalism while respecting our editorial freedom enables us to explore important subjects that may too easily be neglected elsewhere. Sponsorship of individual sections and pages already exists in other areas of guardian.co.uk, and can make possible the otherwise impossible. Without sponsorship, a project such as our global development site would simply not have been realised with such depth and ambition.

What the Guardian doesn’t say, here, is that $2.5 million is what’s technically known as a shit-ton of money. It’s vastly more than it could ever get from ad revenues on a niche site like this — even at a $20 CPM, you’d need to serve up 125 million pageviews over three years to get that much money. Global development issues have a substantial audience, but not that substantial.

More importantly, $2.5 million is significantly more than it costs the Guardian to put together a micro-site like this — this deal is profitable, for a media organization which, like most, is in desperate need of profits. In fact, it’s a twofer for the Guardian, which manages to improve its revenues and also beef up its editorial offerings in one go.

Looked at from the point of view of the Gates Foundation, there’s real value here. For one thing, all of the content automatically gets a lot more credibility than it would if it were published by the Gates Foundation directly, especially given the suspicion with which it’s already regarded. And frankly, publishing well-written, agenda-setting material for a mass audience is not one of the Gates Foundation’s core competencies: if they tried to do it, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t do it very well. (Non-profits in general seem constitutionally incapable of getting out of their wonky high-serious comfort zone.)

And the way these deals are structured, they do a pretty good job of minimizing the sulfurous smell of advertorials and “sponsored content” which has a habit of lingering in even the glossiest sponsor-driven site. Which isn’t to say that they’re not criticized. The Seattle Times did a 2000-word investigation into the Gates Foundation’s media sponsorships earlier this year, and found it quite easy to find critics:

Gates-backed think tanks turn out media fact sheets and newspaper opinion pieces. Magazines and scientific journals get Gates money to publish research and articles. Experts coached in Gates-funded programs write columns that appear in media outlets from The New York Times to The Huffington Post, while digital portals blur the line between journalism and spin…

“Even if we were to satisfy ourselves that the Gates Foundation were utterly benign, it would still be worrisome that they wield such enormous propaganda power,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communications at New York University…

“It would be naive to believe big-money foundations don’t play the same game that corporations and other special interests do,” said Marc Cooper, assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

Cooper actually isn’t troubled by the Gates Foundation, but his point is well taken: if the Gates Foundation can do this kind of thing, other organizations can too. If, that is, they have a lot of money: the foundation’s direct funding for media and media programs, has now reached the $50 million level, and includes $3.6 million to the PBS NewsHour, $3.3 million to Public Radio International, $5 million to NPR, $1 million to Frontline, and $1.5 million to ABC. More controversially, the foundation gave a $500,000 grant to the Brookings Institution so that it could “re-engineer media coverage of secondary and postsecondary education.”

It also helps if you’re all non-profits: most of the recipients of Gates Foundation grants, including the Guardian, PBS, PRI, NPR, and Brookings, fall into that category. The Gates Foundation is clearly happier dealing with other non-profits, and I suspect that places like the Guardian are much happier letting the Gates Foundation “support” a large chunk of their editorial copy than they would be with, say, Monsanto doing the same thing.

The one weird thing about the Gates Foundation’s media partnerships is that the foundation doesn’t seem to value the exposure it’s paying so much for. It’ll go into great detail about how it wants to “build understanding and stimulate conversation around challenges of inequity”, but will tell you, if asked, that “we do not view these partnerships as advertising”. Which is a little bit weird, because the Gates Foundation branding is extremely prominent on the Guardian microsite, and the foundation also accepts all the broadcast recognition that comes with sponsorships on NPR or PBS.

This exposure — at least in context like the Guardian’s microsite — is more valuable than traditional advertising, for the reasons Noah laid out and because it positions the Gates Foundation as an entity which is providing great independent content, rather than one simply pushing its own message. Is all that value really going to waste? I doubt it, somehow — I suspect that somewhere along the line, the foundation was quite active in negotiating its logo placement on the site.

I’d love to see a little more transparency on this front: what value does the foundation think its getting out of that logo placement, and the NPR announcements that it sponsored some show or other? And if the logos and the announcements went away, how much would that reduce the amount of money the foundation was willing to give? Because somewhere in here there’s a model, I think, which can be applied to media buyers who aren’t the Gates Foundation. And I’d love to see how it works.

In the immediate wake of the greatest financial crisis in living memory, Cooper Union looked like a genius. Remember this article by John Hechinger? Here’s the headline, if you don’t:

In particular, Hechinger credited a low-risk investment approach at Cooper Union.

The expansions stem from Cooper’s decision three years ago to ratchet back the financial risk in its endowment, enabling it to avoid the losses that have racked its peers. The college renegotiated a lease to lock in a future income stream from its key property, sold another parcel at a favorable price, raised its cash holdings and picked investment managers that hedged against stock-market declines.

Administrators say they wanted to be especially careful because of the school’s no-tuition policy, which leaves its budget largely dependent on investment income…

John Michaelson, who heads Cooper’s investment committee, said other schools could benefit from taking a lower-risk investing approach.

You know how this is going to end, don’t you.

As Cooper Union officials try to quell the uproar over news that the college may start to charge tuition, some students, alumni, faculty members and college trustees are advocating an inquiry into how the school got into such serious financial trouble.

One bit of the story stands out: it seems that the endowment was leveraging its bets with borrowed money — and has been doing so since 2006.

Cooper Union spent $166 million on a new academic building at 41 Cooper Square, replacing two outmoded buildings. To help pay for that and other projects, and to retire old bonds, it borrowed $175 million in 2006.

The college also invested $32 million of that borrowing in its endowment, calculating that the endowment investments would earn a higher rate of return than the interest Cooper was paying on the loan. That turned out to be a bad bet when the recession hit.

There’s still a lot of murkiness surrounding Cooper Union’s finances, which don’t seem to be quite as bad as the NYT — or, for that matter, Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha — is making out. The endowment is still near its all-time high, with the most recent number being $577 million, while the annual deficit right now is $16.5 million. You can call that unsustainable if you want — and Bharucha does — but there’s no immediate threat to the college here.

Certainly the financial situation at Cooper Union is murky: former president George Campbell Jr is quoted in the NYT as saying “that Cooper’s financial problems had always been well documented in public records like financial statements, reports on trustees’ meetings and his annual addresses on the state of the college”, but I can’t find any of those statements, reports, or addresses on Cooper’s website. Guidestar has the 2009 Form 990, but it’s a bit out of date, and it’s not easy to understand — especially the $319 million in liabilities, including $175 million in “secured mortgages and notes payable”, which help result in total annual interest expenses of more than $10 million. (Salaries and wages, by contrast, the only larger item on the expense statement, are $22 million.)

So I’m very sympathetic to calls for an audit at Cooper Union. There’s no reason that the college’s finances should be this opaque — and the idea of creating a “task force” to investigate options seems designed to ensure that a lot of that information remains confidential. At the very least, the task force should be charged with putting together a detailed history of Cooper Union’s finances right up to the present day, and making that history public for all to see. Otherwise, it’s going to be hard to believe anything we’re told about what’s going on there.

David Dunlap took a visit to the Bronx, and came back with a 13-page slideshow of John Thain’s self-aggrandizement:

The generosity of John A. Thain and his wife, Carmen, in helping rehabilitate the forest has been rewarded with its renaming as the Thain Family Forest. The new name has also been worked into the text of almost every sign…

One expects donors’ names at entrance ways and on directional signs and maps. It’s more unusual to find donors’ names woven into the interpretive narration. At the garden, however, the words “Thain Family Forest” are slipped into signs about black oaks, hemlocks and hillside blueberries (“a favorite of birds and small mammals in the Thain Family Forest”); about vernal pools and great horned owls; about mound formations and forest layering; and even about snags, as standing dead trees are called, which help “reveal the Thain Family Forest’s great age.”

They turn up on prohibitory signs, too. “Please Stay on the Path: The Thain Family Forest is a fragile ecosystem.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the sign beginning, “When a tree falls in the Thain Family Forest —,” you may be tempted to finish the thought yourself, “— does it make a Thain Family Sound?”

A spokeswoman for the New York Botanical Garden tried to say, with a straight face, that the Thain family did not request that the forest be named at all; that the Garden “named it as a thank you for their gift”; and that the ubiquity of the Thain name was simply a function of a “scrupulous interpretive specialist”.

You’re welcome to believe her, if you want. But I’m quite sure that John and Carmen Thain could have declined the Garden’s generous offer to ensure their name was used on first mention every time the forest is mentioned. Or even to use their name at all.

After all, the whole point of this forest is that it dates back to the 17th Century. It’s being carefully managed with Thain funds, which I’m sure have been put to good use. But there’s something vulgarly presumptuous about a Wall Street plutocrat playing happily along with the idea that he and his family should get enormous amounts of public credit, in perpetuity, for what is essentially the same forest where Lenape Indians hunted.

But of course we’re talking about John Thain here. He of the $35,000 commode on legs, and the $87,000 office rug. You’d think he’d have learned his lesson about his displays of wealth having quite the opposite effect to that originally intended. But obviously not.

Andrew Ross Sorkin takes a look at the private life of Apple’s chairman today, passing on rumors about activity he clearly doesn’t want publicized, in the face of stony silence from Apple. But hey, Sorkin’s a journalist, I guess that’s what journalists do.

The column is headlined “The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving,” but really there’s no mystery at all: there is no public giving from Steve Jobs. Sorkin isn’t happy about this. “Most American billionaires have taken up philanthropy in a public way and helped inspire future generations of charitable giving,” he writes, concluding that “perhaps” in future years Jobs might “inspire his legions of admirers to give.”

Some of Sorkin’s points are good ones. There’s no good reason, for instance, for Jobs failing to reinstate Apple’s philanthropic programs, which he cut on the grounds of wanting “to restore the company’s profitability.” Similarly, Apple’s failure to match its employees’ charitable giving does make it stand out — and not in a good way — from its Silicon Valley peers.

I think this is maybe a downside of Jobs’s famous micromanaging: if he’s personally not interested in something, then his entire company becomes uninterested in it.

Now there are good reasons why Jobs might not be much of a philanthropist, at least in public. For one thing, it’s far from clear that seeing billionaires give away lots of money and put their names on hospital wings does any good at all in terms of inspiring other people to make charitable donations. So if a private man like Jobs wants to make his charitable donations privately or anonymously, I don’t see much if any harm in that. And the coverage of Jobs in recent days is proof positive that he’s hardly in need of good press.

On top of that, effective philanthropy is hard work. Just ask Bill Gates. If it’s as difficult to give away money as it is to make it, and if you’re already stretched between making Apple insanely great, spending time with your family, and dealing with personal health issues, then it’s reasonable not to even try on the philanthropy front.

The sad fact of the matter is that Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, will almost certainly outlive him; what’s more, she is more familiar with the philanthropic world than he is, sitting on the boards of Teach for America and the New Schools Venture Fund, among others. Jobs is a technology visionary; that doesn’t make him a great philanthropist. Maybe he’s simply and lovingly trusting his wife to be able to take care of such things after he’s gone. That would be a very admirable and selfless act.

What happens when you drop billions of dollars onto a country like Haiti? Immediately after the earthquake happened, in January 2010, I said that “one of the lessons we’ve learned from trying to rebuild failed states elsewhere in the world is that throwing money at the issue is very likely to backfire”. But that’s exactly what we did — with predictable results.

I’d urge you to read Janet Reitman’s full 12,000-word Rolling Stone article on what an enormous amount of foreign aid has done for Haiti; it’s a wonderful piece of journalism, albeit a very depressing one.

The first thing to note is that most of the money given to Haiti hasn’t even started to be spent yet: a whopping $11 billion was pledged by donor countries and financial institutions in the wake of the earthquake, but if you take the US as a good example, it’s so far managed to spend just $184 million of the $1.14 billion allocated to the country. Even the Red Cross is barely halfway into its $479 million fund — all of which has been earmarked for Haiti, and none of which can be spent elsewhere, no matter how much better it might be put to use in some other context.

But even the amount of money that has been spent has been harmful in its own way. Haiti has been known as “the Republic of NGOs” for well over a decade now, but the earthquake just turbocharged their presence while devastating everything else, leaving foreign aid the only game in town:

“I’ve had two ministers come up to me this week, personally, and ask what’s in it for them,” says a frustrated IHRC official. “Since money grows on trees in this disaster, the attitude among Haitian officials is: Just call up your buddies in Washington, and they’ll send another check.”

Meanwhile, given that it’s difficult to effectively spend money in Haiti, millions of dollars are making their way to people like our old friends at Dalberg:

There was significant grumbling in aid circles, for example, when the department awarded a $1.5 million contract to a New York-based consulting firm called Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Glenn Smucker, an anthropologist who specializes in Haiti, was asked to brief the Dalberg team, which included several summer associates from Harvard Business School. “They were nice people, but they struck me as naive about Haiti,” he says. “They asked the appropriate questions and were eager to learn, but from what I gathered, they had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or any background in urban planning, and they’d never carried out any program activities on the ground. Only one of them spoke any French. They were being asked to do extremely important things that they had no background to do.”

One of Dalberg’s assignments was to do an assessment of a broad, bow-tie-shaped swath of land near the Corail camp, where thousands of Haitians had moved earlier that spring. Even as refugees were streaming onto the land and establishing squatter camps, the State Department hoped to create new communities in the area as part of an attempt to depopulate Port-au-Prince. It was the second time in three months that consultants had assessed the area, and after Dalberg was finished, a team of experts from USAID was brought in to reassess the assessments. “One of the sites they said was habitable was actually a small mountain,” says Bill Vastine, one of the experts on the USAID team. “It had an open-mined pit on one side of it, a severe 100-foot vertical cliff, and ravines.” After looking at the photos in Dalberg’s report, he said, “it became clear that these people may not even have gotten out of their SUVs.” The process of assessments and reassessments dragged on for months. In the end, only one of the six sites approved by Dalberg was deemed viable for relocation.

I’m pretty sure that when individuals and politicians committed billions of dollars to Haiti, they weren’t intending for it to be spent on callow HBS types who generate headlines like “With Andrew Stern’s Help, US Executes Holistic Rebuilding Approach in Haiti”.

Meanwhile, Haiti’s suffering if anything is getting worse. Not only are new shantytowns springing up in places like Corail, but disease is now spreading disastrously: cholera hadn’t been seen in Haiti for more than 60 years, before the earthquake; it has now infected more than 250,000 Haitians, with no sign that it’s remotely under control.

It’s worth remembering, too, that there was reason for optimism regarding the rebuilding of Haiti. There was lots of money, and the country’s right on America’s doorstep, which also helps. On top of that, it had the best conceivable international ambassador in Bill Clinton, backed up with the full support of the US government in the form of his wife’s oft-stated commitment to getting Haiti back on its feet.

Development is a tricky game, easy to get wrong; as a rule, it only works when the people providing the aid are working at the margin, helping to strengthen existing projects, industries, and institutions, rather than trying to build them all from scratch. Let’s target it where it can be most effective, rather than where there happens to have been a newsworthy natural disaster. Of course Haiti needed help after the earthquake, but $11 billion was far too much for the fragile and damaged economy to bear. It’s a lesson worth remembering, the next time a natural disaster triggers another wave of appeals for financial aid.

A quick reply to Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, which with luck will bring this exchange to an end: I’m not saying that they make the case for the status quo. But when Davos Young Global Leaders, like Bishop, intone importantly about how “there is an urgent need to tackle fundamental flaws in the economic system” and how CEOs need to concentrate on long-term enlightened self-interest rather than “short-termist behavior”, the very corporate chieftains they’re trying to reach are going to nod in serious agreement and claim in all sincerity to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Never in the history of Davos has a CEO got up on stage and said “I’m trying to make as much money as I can before the board finds me out and fires me”. Which is precisely why CEOs don’t think that Bishop and Green are talking to them. And on top of that, the Philanthrocapitalists are happy reducing the pressure on any individual CEO even further with rhetoric like this:

A capitalism that is more responsible is not going to come from a few enlightened CEOs choosing to do good – it will only come from an overhaul of the way business is run.

That’s not a call to action, it’s a call to sermonize. And it will achieve nothing beyond getting Bishop and Green a few more speaking fees from companies which like to pat themselves on the back for being socially conscious. Which is why I say that Philanthrocapitalism is ultimately friendly to the status quo.

Bishop and Green don’t explicitly say that the status quo is a good thing: in fact, they explicitly say that it is profoundly broken. But they say that in an extremely CEO-friendly way, designed to allow leaders who think of themselves as long-term visionaries to also consider themselves to be downright philanthropic simply by dint of their enlightened strategic thought. It’s always other CEOs who are the problem. Or it’s not even CEOs at all: it’s the whole system.

The message of Philanthrocapitalism, then, is one which allows leaders to wriggle all too easily out of having to do anything. Which is why it’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference to the way the world is run, no matter how many important people read it.

Give him points for chutzpah, at least. Matthew Bishop has responded to my post about profits and philanthropy with an astonishing assertion: that his ideas, and those of Daniel Altman, are so fresh and new that I’m scorning them out of sheer unfamiliarity. I’m a “traditionalist,” says Matthew, a “John Bull turning up his nose at ‘foreign muck.’” It seems I’m stuck 20 years or so in the past: since then, says, Matthew, there’s been a “growing realisation that business does have the capacity to create as well as destroy social value.”

The realization that business has the capacity to create as well as destroy social value is known as “economics,” and goes back at least as far as Adam Smith. There’s nothing new about it, and nor is there anything new about economists using this insight to assuage the guilt of the rich. Here’s Joan Robinson writing in 1936, and talking about someone who more or less fits the self-image of a Davos CEO: a person with intelligence, conscience, and wealth.

He cannot keep all three – integrity of mind, a quiet conscience, and the privileges of wealth. One must be sacrificed. If he is a saint he sacrifices the wealth – but we will suppose that he is not. If he is a man of no definite religious creed he can keep his mental honesty and his income by sacrificing his conscience. He can say “I am a selfish individual. I don’t pretend to have any better right than anyone else to a comfortable life, but I propose to enjoy it if I can.” …

Now, it is here that the economist is a godsend to him. The economist is a self-appointed expert. It is his business to know about these things. A man may have an honest and independent mind and yet take on trust the opinion of experts on a subject that he has not time to master for himself. If the economist tells him it is all right, then he can keep his integrity, his income and his conscience all intact.

One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was to fill this want. It was a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society. Even the poor were better off under the existing system than they would be under any other.

Daniel Altman’s “single bottom line” idea — that by maximizing profits companies also maximize social welfare — falls squarely into this tradition. Far from being new, it was old even in the 1930s.

Here’s Robinson 41 years later, making the same point in a different way:

Freedom is the great ideal. Along with the concept of freedom goes freedom of the market, and the philosophy of orthodox economics is that the pursuit of self-interest will lead to the benefit of society. By this means the moral problem is abolished. The moral problem is concerned with the conflict between individual interest and the interest of society. And since this doctrine tells us that there is no conflict, we can all pursue our self-interest with a good conscience.

Robinson makes a strong case that Adam Smith himself did not actually believe this — but certainly many of the orthodox economists who followed him did.

Bishop himself criticizes Altman on the grounds that he treats “the chronic short-termism of today’s stock market capitalism only as an afterthought” — but that implicitly agrees with Altman that if businesses could just see their way clear to concentrating on the very long term, then the profit motive would automagically align with maximizing social welfare. This is dangerous, because Davos Man always thinks of himself as concentrating on the very long term. And I defy you to find a corporate leader who will ever say that chasing short-term profits is a better idea than maximizing value over the long term. When corporate leaders listen to Altman and Bishop, then, they get the message that if they just do what they claim to be doing already, then they’re already doing all they can in terms of their corporate social function.

Bishop cites anonymous “critics” as saying he’s being “too idealistic”; I’d love to know who these critics are. The truth is that Altman, and to some degree Bishop too, is being too ideological, with their article of faith that long-term profitability means long-term social welfare. Tell that to the companies removing mountaintops.

Of course it’s possible that a company — even a profit-maximizing company — can have positive social impact. Matthew’s example of IBM is a good one, although given the scale of IBM’s philanthropy I don’t think it’s actually profit-maximizing, at the margin. Altman would I’m sure have some convoluted explanation of how IBM’s philanthropy makes it a more desirable place to work and thereby helps to maximize long-term profits, but those kind of arguments are unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

Matthew also says I’m wrong when I say that his Economist article favors IBM over the Carnegie Corporation. I’ll quote, you decide:

In the first 50 years, the impact of the Carnegie Corporation on society dwarfed that of IBM…

Judged on the past 50 years, there is a strong case for saying IBM has had more impact than Carnegie…

The achievements of IBM and the Carnegie Corporation are impossible to quantify mathematically. What seems clear, though, is that as it enters its second century, IBM can plausibly hope that its best years lie ahead. Alas, that seems most unlikely for Carnegie.

If I was a corporate leader reading this, I’d happily take away the message that successful corporate leadership is the best way of improving the state of the world — even better than pure philanthropy. And I’d be greatly encouraged by Altman, who says this, in a comment on my post:

We think that using the single bottom line with a long (not infinite) time horizon will actually encourage profit-maximizing companies to invest in more social initiatives, since they’ll see how those initiatives can help their profitability in the long term.

I find it very hard to see how this is meant to work in practice. After all, the base case for any public company is to have a single bottom line with a long time horizon. Simply being funded by permanent capital won’t in and of itself make executives invest more in social initiatives, or open their eyes to the long-term value thereof — especially when any such investment carries an opportunity cost and means that there’s some other project which would have to be abandoned as a result.

I suspect that a weak form of Altman’s thesis might well be true. If a company’s equity capital comes from investors with a medium-term time horizon and one eye on the exit — VCs or private-equity shops — then that company is probably less likely to invest in social initiatives than if it’s a public company with permanent equity capital.

But that doesn’t mean that simply having a single bottom line and a focus on maximizing profit is the best possible way to maximize social impact. Public companies might look better, from a social perspective, than those run by corporate raiders and buyout chieftains. But that’s a pretty low bar to set.

Dalberg is an international consultancy which explains, on its About page, that “we value social impact above profit but recognize that a sustainable business model is essential to our success”. Makes a certain amount of sense: if you want to do a lot of good in the world, it’s helpful not to be having to beg for money all the time. And of course that mission makes it much easier for Dalberg to charge huge sums of money and help its owners on their path to wealth and fortune.

Daniel Altman is an economist who glories in the title of Director of Thought Leadership at Dalberg, and he’s now written a paper which essentially seeks to eradicate the distinction between social impact and profit altogether. Social impact, he says, along with similar ideas like double bottom lines or corporate social responsibility (CSR) and creating shared value (CSV),

are inefficient workarounds or substitutes that should ultimately lead back to a single bottom line – profit – with a long time horizon and rational expectations. Executives targeting profitability with a sufficiently long time horizon will make investments that generate social benefits because these investments serve the interests of their companies. Moreover, companies that take this approach will generate social benefits more efficiently and sustainably than those using typical strategies for CSR or CSV.

Altman’s paper cites Philanthrocapitalism. That book’s author, Matthew Bishop, has a similar essay this week in the Economist, comparing IBM to the Carnegie Corporation and concluding that the former has done more for society than the latter.

All of this is profoundly silly. Both Altman and Bishop are all in favor of companies engaging in philanthropic initiatives, although only Altman goes so far as to say that they have to be justifiable on a P&L basis. He writes:

If companies view social initiatives as cost centers rather than contributors to profitability, then these initiatives are likely to become procyclical, being cut in downturns and then reinstated when balance sheets are flush again. Their budgets will be arbitrary rather than being linked to a rate of return. As investments expected to be competitive and profitable, by contrast, social initiatives will enjoy more durable support from executives and become a core part of corporate operations.

The problem here is that Altman’s idea of profitability turns on the idea that “the time horizon for a company’s decision-making should be infinite” — and if he’d ever spent any time running a for-profit company, he’d know full well that in downturns, corporate time horizons are anything but. Even the most enlightened CEO will increase the discount rate with which she calculates distant profits when she runs into short-term trouble — and if you’re calculating philanthropic returns on an NPV basis over an infinite time horizon, a small tweak to the discount rate can easily mean the difference between profitability and being axed.

But the point in the paper at which Altman becomes a complete laughingstock to any genuine capitalist is in his third hypothetical of how corporate philanthropy can be profitable:

The chief executive of a major electronics manufacturer is deciding whether to develop a line of low-cost smart phones for sale at a small margin in poor countries. This investment would cost $100 million and generate an expected rate of return of only 2 percent. However, the chief executive is convinced that the investment is a moral one, and she would get substantial personal satisfaction from making it. Her salary is due to increase by $3 million during the period in which the investment would take place, but she will accept a raise of only $1 million if the investment goes forward. With this additional factor in mind, the expected rate of return on the investment doubles to 4 percent; it is now more competitive with the other investment opportunities in the company’s portfolio.

I had to read this a few times to be sure I understood it right: apparently the CEO of a major electronics manufacturer is going to take a $2 million pay cut just so that she can get “substantial personal satisfaction” from selling phones in poor countries. I can just imagine her presentation to the board: “we’ve created this wonderful line of phones which is profitable, but not very profitable, so in order to make it reach an adequate IRR, I’ve decided to ask you to pay me $2 million less.”

Bishop’s article doesn’t have anything quite that ridiculous, but it is based on an equally silly premise: that we can learn something useful from comparing IBM to the Carnegie Corporation, just because they were both founded 100 years ago:

Comparing the records of those giants of 20th-century American capitalism—or “philanthrocapitalism”—can shed light on a question that is keenly debated today: whether philanthropy or business is more effective at “Making the World Work Better”, to borrow the title of the book celebrating IBM’s centenary.

Well, no, actually, it can’t. Bishop’s conclusion is that Carnegie wins the first 50 years while IBM wins the second 50 years and the prize. But you’d want Carnegie to be front-loaded, since that’s how philanthropy works best. Bishop admits as much:

100 years is too old for a philanthropic foundation…

Many of today’s philanthropists aim, as Carnegie did, to give away all their money by the time they die, or at least put a time limit on the lifespan of their foundation after their death. The Gates Foundation will have to be wound down 50 years after the second of Bill and Melinda Gates dies.

On top of that, Bishop’s choice of IBM exhibits massive survivorship bias. The Carnegie Corporation was the only mega-philanthropy in the world in 1911: Bishop has chosen 100% of the big philanthropies of the day to see how they fared. But IBM was just one of thousands of companies founded that year, and it’s almost certainly the only one which could even come close to giving Carnegie a run for its money in this particularly weird competition. Carnegie never aspired, when he created his foundation, to outperform every single corporation ever to be founded. Instead, he simply aspired to make the world a much better place, which is exactly what he did.

The good news here is that these attempts by Altman and Bishop to elide the distinction between capitalism and philanthropy — to make rapacious executives feel good about being greedy — are such transparent failures that with any luck they’ll mark the turning point at which people do good to do good, rather than simply declaring that the best way they can do good is to chase profit as zealously as possible. You can’t just invest money in the stock market and declare it the best way to do good in the world, any more than you can start an arms or cigarette manufacturer and claim that your pursuit of profits is the best way to improve global welfare. And I must admit it’s a little depressing to find the likes of Altman and Bishop helping the global plutocracy think otherwise.