Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Wealthy Use “Charity” to Screw Everyone Else with Amy Schiller

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

When we donate to charity, we aim to have the most significant impact possible, yet it's easy to feel like our giving makes zero difference. The rise of effective altruism, a philosophical model designed to achieve the most substantial potential impact with giving, seemed poised to combat this, but does treating people like data help? Or does it exclude the dimensions of life and what actually makes us human? In this episode, Adam is joined by Amy Schiller, author of "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It," to discuss these cultural shifts in philanthropy and what we can do to ensure we are making an impact. Find Amy's book at factuallypod.com/booksToday's episode is sponsored by NordVPN, try an exclusive offer available to Facutally! listeners at https://nordvpn.com/adamconoverSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show I don't know anything That's actually going to make a difference, especially because, you know, we've got a world full of billionaires donating money all the time and the world doesn't actually seem to be getting better. Right. So how do we actually make an improvement with our money? Well, a couple of years ago, a savior emerged in the form of a movement called effective altruism. This was a group of scientists, philosophers and researchers who pledged to use their huge brains to figure out what the most effective forms of charity were. They did rigorous research. They conducted studies. They held conferences and they convinced a lot of very rich people to donate huge amounts of money for the betterment of humanity. It seemed like a really great thing until a couple years later when the entire movement collapsed. It turns out they got into bed with the crypto fraudsters like Sam Bankman Freed, and now the entire philosophical movement behind effective altruism has been largely discredited.

How did this happen? How did a group of people dedicated to figuring out the best and most selfless ways to better humanity get embroiled in one of the largest financial frauds of all time? Is it even possible for philanthropy to do good in the world when things like this happen? And how can average people like you or me donate money to actually make the world a better place this giving season? Well, to answer these questions, we have an incredible guest on the show. But before we get to that, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free and helps

keep the podcast free for everyone else who wants to listen to it. I also want to remind you I am a touring standup comedian. If you want to come see me in a city near you, I just announced a whole new set of tour dates. I'm going to New York, Philly, Atlanta, Boston, Nashville, D.C., and a whole bunch more. Head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to today's guest. Her name is Amy Schiller. She's a writer and academic who worked in the world of philanthropy for years. But now she has a new book out called The Price of Humanity, How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It.

It is such a smart and entertaining take on this entire industry and everything that plagues it and how you can actually make the world a better place. So without further ado, let's get to this interview with Amy Schiller. Amy, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure to be here. I'm so excited to meet you. Oh, that's really nice. I'm so excited to meet you. Oh, that's really nice. I'm very excited to meet you. Yeah. Because I've been covering for a long time the problems with philanthropy.

Philanthropy is proposed to us as this wonderful thing. It's how the rich change the world. You can do it yourself. You can contribute. What could possibly be bad about giving money away? You have written an entire book called The Price of Humanity, How Philanthropy Went Wrong, the entire thing. How did philanthropy go wrong? What is the problem with it? I'll tell you how I think philanthropy went wrong,

because you have very ably covered many ways that it's gone wrong. But here's what I think has gone wrong. It's drifted from the actual meaning of the word philanthropy. So for me, the entry point is philanthropy means love of humanity. And my concern is that I saw a lot of philanthropic movements and trends moving towards a definition of humanity that to me felt very narrow and reductive. So this all comes down to how we define humanity. Is humanity sustenance, merely surviving, or is humanity really about thriving and our full human capabilities to flourish and to create new things in common with one another? So my feeling is philanthropy went wrong when it started to become a utilitarian practice and not an enabler of human flourishing.

And I think the word utilitarian is going to come up a couple of times in this conversation. But what's an example of somebody getting that wrong so I can understand more better what you mean? Absolutely. Well, I'll jump into the sort of hot button version of it, which is effective altruism embodied by now disgraced fraudster Sam Bankman Freed, but having a long trajectory before that beginning as a philosophy that basically said, we can rank the moral worth of giving based on how many lives per dollar we save. So a very narrow definition of what constituted valid philanthropy and what philanthropy's purpose was. Let me say, I first encountered the idea of effective altruism close to 10 years ago.

I actually, in my first show, Adam Ruins Everything, had some effective altruism adjacent ideas. For instance, in our very first episode, which was called Adam ruins giving, it was the pilot of the whole show. We did a whole segment on how you shouldn't give food to food banks. You should give money to food banks because giving food makes you feel good. Giving money actually helps them the most because then they can buy the foods that people actually need. We made fun of Tom's shoes for giving away these free shoes when like, why not just give money?

Right. Why not give the thing? Why not trust people to make their own decisions? Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of validity to that. And it I still think there is to some degree. It also dovetails with, you know, a very rigorous evidence based approach that is like, hey, if we actually, you know, a very rigorous evidence-based approach that it's like, hey, if we actually, you know, a lot of charity goes to waste, if you actually want to make sure that the money that you donate goes to the right place, well, then you should be able to like really rigorously show that it has had a positive effect. There are groups like GiveWell that would do these really rigorous studies. I would read them and look at their recommendations. And then it was

all based on, yeah, the utilitarian philosophy of Peter Singer, right? Which is that, I mean, you can probably express it better than I can, but you know, the sort of general philosophy of like the, the ends are the most important thing. The number of lives saved, the amount of pain and suffering that you've prevented in the world. And I always knew, look, as the holder of a bachelor's of philosophy, I always knew there's no, you know, that philosophy isn't necessarily true in all respects, but it's defensible, right?

It's respectable. There's a lot of validity to it. So I always enjoyed this sort of, oh, very rigorous view of philanthropy. And for a bunch of years, I would donate money according to the effective altruist donations to the Against Malaria Foundation.

That was always the best ranked one. That was like for every, it was like for every couple thousand dollars you could save a life. And I was like, oh, I donated a couple thousand dollars. I think I saved one life. That was, I followed a lot of this. And now we're in a place where it's been entirely discredited because it got wrapped up in crypto and Sam Bankman Freed and AI and all these really weird practices. How did that happen? OK, I want to first just pause and say there are some really important things that you point out here, which is that giving money is absolutely better as an act of trust and

solidarity and love for one's fellow human beings than giving stuff, which is really a mode of kind of retaining control and retaining a sort of paternalistic view. I think I know what you need. Here it is. Exactly. If I give you money, you're going to go spend it on drugs or alcohol. So here's a nice tie that you can wear to your office job that I think you should get or whatever it is. Exactly. And actually, the problem with effective altruism starts with a similar but maybe way expanded level of that kind of hubris, a sense of we, the smartest people with the best algorithms, know best how money should be used. So it was never a philosophy of actual trust and engagement with other people. It was always a philosophy of, here's a philosophical term for you, epistemological

hubris. A real sense of, we can optimize and we can perfect the exact sort of quantifiable change that our philanthropy is going to produce. And that makes us feel good in the same way that a lot of philanthropy is really designed to make the donor feel good, feel validated in themselves. You're kind of blowing my mind because the whole premise of effective altruism is, oh, so many donations are just feel good but effective altruism is you point out feel good in a different way because you sort of have that it's almost like when you buy something off the wire cutter recommendation you're like i got the best one right i feel so proud because i know i got the best one you follow the give well recommendation i followed all the evidence this says that this

is the best donation yes i'm the best little boy well a very um like a real extension of the sort of um puritan work ethic of like oh i um instead of i have just have the best character and now it's i was also the smartest right so you get to in fact you get to have both where you're like not only am i such good person, but I'm the smartest at being a good person. So there's a lot of ego wrapped up in that method that ultimately, I think, proved itself, proved its undoing that says, okay, this was never really engaged with the complexities of systems, the complexities of what people on the ground might say they need, or even the complexity of systems change. In fact, if you look at the effective altruists publications, they would say, we're not getting involved in political change. That takes too long. There's no way to measure the delta. There's no way to be secure. Again, going back to that kind of need for validation, need for confirmation of efficacy. So being part of something that might be a longer, more complex, but ultimately more transformative initiative for what you use your dollars for was not attractive to them because they want, you know, effective altruists want the

immediate, the tangible, the concrete, the quantifiable for their own gratification, in my opinion. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the roots of this movement. So yes. So Peter Singer, again, utilitarian philosopher sort of develops these philosophies about if you want to do the most good and you should, that's sort of an ethical burden on you, then you should figure out the way to save the most lives, reduce the most suffering.

And it's purely a philosophical position, but it gets picked up by what we call the effective altruism movement. Who are these people and where did they come from? Effective altruism has a lot of purchase among tech wealth um on the west coast so uh dustin moskovitz who's one of the facebook founders he's a major he and his wife carrie tuna major funders of give well um now this goes to other household names elon musk has jumped on the effective altruist um train um peter thiel has jumped on the effective altruist train. Peter Thiel has jumped on the effective altruism train as well. There's a lot of spread, a lot of creep, I would say, about this philosophy. But it fits in neatly with this idea that the world is reducible to calculation. The world

is reducible to some kind of definitive algorithmic analysis. So the idea is that a problem like poverty can be solved by some kind of uniquely identifiable single kind of line item of what you're going to give to people. It could be bed nets. It could be something else. But it is this idea that somehow there's one intervention that your money can do that somehow is going to have an outsized effect on people's lives. There's a satisfaction in that. Yeah. Right. I mean, I remember donating the Against Malaria Foundation, which I have no reason to believe is a bad organization. Um, and you know, you make your donation and they, they show you a little progress update for like the dollars, you know, how many bed nets your, your dollars are buying and where

they're going and how many people they're going to protect. And it feels so quantifiable and positive. And malaria is a huge problem and it kills many people. And, uh, I'll take it on faith that the lack of bed nets is a problem. And it's something that, you know, I can if I buy two more bed nets, then those are two more people who are going to have access to them. But it is my feeling that it's still my emotion that's that is being triggered there. The Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton referred to the effective altruist movement as the idea that. Past guest Angus Deaton, by the way. Past guest. Thank you. Great.

A colleague then. Nobel Prize on the show before. And that means one for you in the future. Thank you. Appreciate that. So he referred to effective altruism as the idea that lives can be bought cheaply, like used cars. It's the idea that lives are bought. You're looking for the best deal. You're looking for lives that you can gain cost effectively. Yeah.

That feels like a kind of icky, reductive way of looking at other human beings. Yeah. It's like you're doing your charity, like storage wars, like you're showing up going like, how much can I get for, oh, those, those lives are going for like 10 bucks each. Like, how much can I get for all those? Those lives are going for like 10 bucks each. I can save a bunch of lives over there. Yes. And that, in fact, is used as an argument for it.

Why would you spend your charity dollar in the US? It'll go much further if you spend it overseas. You'll save more lives. Exactly. Which is like on the one hand, the first time you hear that, you're like, OK, yeah, maybe I am being, you know, chauvinistic by saying, oh, people in my city are better, more important. Maybe I should, all lives are equal, right? But then on the other hand, after a while you start going, well, why wouldn't I try to improve the place I live? That's where I live. Right. It's where I live and it's where I'm actually in relationship with other

people in some really important way. So you have a bigger chance, a better shot at seeing people as Exactly. that really see people as only their vulnerability, only their need, only their desperation that you then the hero donor can save for just $1 a day with just one bed net. There's a real, you want to talk about chauvinism, but there's a real egotistical feedback loop that comes with that that has a less chance of evolution than if you say, okay, I'm really focusing giving in a way that keeps me in deep connected relationship with other people and build some common world that I want to share with them. And that's what the people sort of running this movement kind of lacked. They weren't actually in community with anybody other than themselves and the wealthy people that they hung out with. And that really led to some biases. Like I, I used to read the give well.org recommendations every year and see how they would rank different things. And then one year I went, well, hold on a

second. I'm really concerned about climate change. Have they done any work on climate change? And I dug into there, like they publish all their papers. It's very academic and rigorous. And I went and looked at the climate change and they had done, you know, a couple of pages on it and they were like, well, we evaluated some things, but we couldn't really find proof. You know, they, they want really rigorous evidence that your dollar is going to, you know, create such and such good. And they're like, we couldn't really find a charity that would prove that. Right. And I'm going, well, what do you have to like, you know, can't we have like that, that standard is really high. And then I started looking at the other things that were recommend recommending and they had

started to go, Oh, a new area of focus for us is AI mitigation. We're really worried. And by the way, this was like seven or five to seven years ago, they were like, we're really worried that AI is going to take over the world. And if we invest money right now, preventing AI from taking over the world, that's going to be the most valuable. And I was like, who you're not working on climate change, but you are working on AI. Like what? Why? And well, there's two things happening there. And one is that climate change is really ill suited to their framework. It's, it's complex. It's multivalent. It's going to require lots of different kinds of interventions going to require social movements it's stuff that you can't easily quantify and it's going to happen at a much slower pace than

the kind of immediacy of like bed net equals life you know um the other thing that's going on there is that the appeal of the long term future, because long termism is the sort of new fad that you're referring to. That became their new thing. That's the new thing. Not just five years or 10 years into the future, but like 10,000 years. Right. So this is sort of the end state of thinking of humanity only in terms of volume. end state of thinking of humanity only in terms of volume, like how the number of beings that we count as human beings who could maximally be alive, and not about quality of life, not about quality of our world, but really just the numbers. I refer in the book to

their philosophy of existing human beings as depreciating assets, right? If you're a human being that's alive today, you have liabilities. You can't, you know, immediately, you can't quite maximize. We're not ideal figures. You can't maximize our utility. You can't maximize our labor. We might have sickness. We're going to age. Like, it's like you drive a car off the lot to extend Angus Deaton's analogy. The moment a human being is alive, it has liabilities. And so if they're looking for this perfect, optimized, idealized human civilization that really is about maximizing the number of human beings that are alive and productive at any given time, then you're going to look way into the future when it's just a computer model. You're not going to deal with the reality of human beings in

the here and now because it's too complex and it's too compromised in a way. There's also a degree to which it's taking a philosophical thought experiment and taking it literally. It's all well and good to write, well,, well, hey, if I could, you know, if you could spend a thousand dollars and save one life today or you could spend a thousand dollars and save ten thousand lives in the future because you are preventing AI mitigation or you're mitigating an AI that could potentially kill billions of people in the future. And you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. In a philosophical thought experiment, you could, you could have a fun time deciding which is more important. But like, as a someone who studied philosophy, I was always like, well, you don't actually

do that shit. You know what I mean? It's a thought experiment. Right. Like the Chinese room isn't real. Right. The lever that makes the train go from one, you know. I hope I can say on this show that there's something masturbatory about all of it.

You know, there is something like. Philosophy philosophy is inherently masturbatory i couldn't agree more and that's the great thing about it i love masturbating well it's been great being on this show i'm glad but i don't i don't but you know masturbating is that's only one part of my life i don't take that to the rest of my social life that's not something about pie charts adam we don't have to look at the breakdown. It's okay. Let's move off of this metaphor, but yeah, there's, there's an oddness to taking it.

Even taking utilitarianism, which again, I think is a philosophy with a lot to recommend it. I'm not like some Peter Singer hater, but it is the kind of thing where when you actually take it really seriously, like, well,

the, the big problem with effective altruism is it's absolutism. The fact that there's really very little room for alternative ways of thinking. And to me, that's symptomatic of a bigger problem, which is that are under our current kind of. Now, can I use the term neoliberal here? Can we talk about neoliberalism? Fantastic. So under neoliberalism, which is the kind of philosophy that we really need to be competitive in the market as much as possible, that our whole lives need to be kind of oriented towards

our performance in the economic market, it means that that takes over our lives to the exclusion of all other ways of relating to ourselves and to other people. And effective altruism is this kind of consummate example of that taking over philanthropy of saying, well, you know, human beings are really just, you know, the metric that we use to judge worth is whether we're alive and economically productive. And that's the mode by which we decide where our charitable dollars go. And that excludes so many other dimensions of human life and things that make life worth living and actually make us human. Well, how did effective altruism get involved with crypto and with Sam Bankman Freed? Because this is the oddest part of the story, I think. Right. Well, I'm not a journalist with expertise on the kind of chronology of that,

but I can say that early effective altruism was popular among a kind of class of young bankers who signed onto this idea of earning to give, right? This was part of the philosophy was like, oh, instead of going to work for a nonprofit where there's going to be limits, constraints on how much good I can personally contribute, the idea is, oh, if I go make a ton of money working in banking, working in a hedge fund, and I give it away to the most effective charities, then I'll be doing so much more good.

I want to pause and just say, notice how much the I figures in to all of this. Notice how much this is about the sovereign self, the sovereign control, I as the sort of actor in history. And there's a missing parentheses in that little story, which is also in the second version, I'll be fucking rich. Of course. I'll have a private jet and a penthouse. And like at any time, I can just keep more of the money if it works for me. Like even if you start off saying, OK, I'm going to live a monkish existence and donate my seven figure bonuses to effective altruist ranked charities, that's fine.

But at any given time, you can still choose to pull back and say, you know what? I actually would like some of this money for myself. I feel like I've, you know, accumulated enough virtue points in the world. Yeah. Versus actually working in service of other people. Right. If you were to, for instance, take a $70,000 a year job as a social worker, which would be a great salary for a social worker and actually work in in service of others, now your needs are less prioritized.

Your needs are less prioritized and you just don't have as much control. You're working with other people as well and within systems. So there's this undercurrent of maximizing the amount of control that you, the donor, have, even if you are allegedly doing it all for humanity. So there's this whole cohort of bankers who are signed on to this philosophy. Right. There's a story in the book about a guy named Matt Wage, who was a student of Peter Singer's. And this is an early description of this philosophy. He says, imagine if you walked past a burning building and you could save all 100 people who were inside. You had a way of putting out the fire or you could kick down the door and save 100 people. That would be the greatest day of your life. And you're like,

the greatest day of your life. Everybody else inside had a pretty shitty day. Right. Also, especially because there was one guy trying to save all them instead of an entire firefighting system. And also their building burned down because, you know, of poor safety codes. Right. You know, maybe the, you know, the building inspector had been, you know, defunded the previous year because there had been some tax cuts across the city. Right. So that the, you know, so the hero guy walking around now is like you, your hedge fund you work for holds a bond against that debt, by the way. Right. So, yes, those people didn't have great days, but the but the hero who rescued everybody at the best day.

have great days but the but the hero who rescued everybody you had the best day right so um i think you can draw a line from that uh that mentality to a sam bankman freed who says ah aha like here is a movement taylor made for me a guy who thinks he is the smartest and the most effective and really doesn't have to answer to anybody else. As we found out, he really didn't think he did. So there was a there's a sort of through line of justification of accumulating wealth by any means because you're going to put it to, as you put it, the right ends. Yeah. So that's how we end up with a Sam Bankman Freed.

And he became completely entwined in the effective altruism movement. My understanding is a huge amount. Money started flooding into this movement. The New Yorker did a wonderful piece on this. They started buying buildings or whatever and having all this space and yada, yada, yada. And a lot of that money was coming from Sam Bankman Freed and other crypto people. And now that he is about, as we speak right now, about to go to prison for a very long time because he was convicted of one of the most massive financial frauds in American history. It's discredited the movement because the like the leading lights of this movement, the philosopher kings who were writing the papers

and spreading the good word were like best buddies with him, one of the most unethical people in the history of the country. Why? Because he had the money. Because he had the money. The entire board of the FTX Foundation resigned and wrote an open letter once the indictments came for Sam. And there were a number of responses that basically said, you guys have PhDs from Oxford.

How could you have worked with this guy and had a foundation that was allegedly going to give out $100 million a year and buy into all of this hype without really checking the reality yeah they were going to give out a hundred million dollars a year to save lives and the future of humanity yada yada but that was money that they got because they just stole it stole it from other people who were told like but those were disappeared but misunderstand. Those people were dumber. They were just dumber. They were dumb enough to believe what we told them, which is that FTX and all that was a great investment.

Exactly. So clearly they would not have been better. They were not worthy stewards of this money the way we, the people stealing it from them, would have been. One of the things I find most fascinating about this is that it's a really rare example of a philosophical idea or a philosophical movement, starting with Peter Singer and the utilitarians, that is now discredited.

I have to think that there's been some backlash in the philosophical academy about this because of its association with the real world. It's rare for a philosophical idea to interact with the real world so badly that it becomes discredited. That seems to have happened here, at least to me. It has, and it's happened quickly, right? It's happened in this very compressed timeframe where you have this rise of trend of effective altruism, like you say, Neworker profiles major public figures coming into view um it's you know not typical to have a like giving philosophy becoming such a zeitgeisty thing um and then you have this scandal that happened so quickly and so dramatically

and i think what it proved is the flaws that were baked into the philosophical model like immediately proved true the moment it started to interact with. I don't think in a way it's surprising that this happened because this is just the inevitable product of a philosophy that says we can do the most good in the world without actually really caring about other people and our obligations to them. Yeah, it's really interesting because again, utilitarianism is not something I throw out by itself, but the knock against it is always that it leads to sort of perverse

outcomes. If you actually follow through on it. Right. And holy shit, it happened immediately. Right. Who could have predicted everyone? It do be like that.

It, it do be like that. You know, I honestly, I'd love to have Peter Singer on this show because I still think he's a fascinating thinker. Absolutely. And I'd love to hear how he interacts with some of what happened since. But you know what? Let's take a really quick break because I want to talk to you when we get back about

other streams of philanthropic thought and mistakes that have been made and how we can actually maybe, you know, help each other in a more productive way. But we'll be right back with more Amy Schiller. OK, we are back with Amy Schiller talking about philanthropy and all of its problems. And solutions. And solutions. We're going to talk about solutions, too.

But I want to talk about one more problem first. Yes, let's. We just talked about the philosophy of effective altruism. I've covered recently on my YouTube channel, billionaire philanthropy, people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Andrew Carnegie going back into history. This idea that billionaires can save the world by donating all of their money. And people can go watch that video if they want to sort of see, you know, the full version of that debunking and my thoughts on it. But I want to ask you about a specific example of it that's often presented as being a positive because I know you covered in the book. Mackenzie Scott, who is Jeff Bezos's ex-wife.

I was going to say widow. He's not dead. We can hope his ex-wife. She received billions in the divorce. Yeah. And she has been giving the money away like crazy. And people often say in the comments of my videos, I'm Mackenzie Scott. Now she's a great example. She's she's a good example of this because she's just trying to get rid of this shit. I'm curious what your take is on her. Well, it's very like you're right.

You're also right. You know, a very kind of fiddler on the roof approach where it's like, you're right. She is doing it better than any billionaire. She's giving her money away in really admirable, transformative ways. And what makes it better than how they give it away? She gives it away unrestricted. That's the number one thing. And I'll get back to that in a second. But the thing is that she is doing her philanthropy, I think, better than others. But because of that, you can see the limits of philanthropy's actual power to create social change. So I'll explain why. tens of millions of dollars in tranches. And she works with a team of consultants and they do a lot of vetting behind the scenes. And so unlike many situations where nonprofits have to write grant reports and massage all their language to fit a funders, oh, we're really interested in this particular thing. Or can you make this about dogs somehow?

You know, there's like so much. I want a building with my name on it can i can have a nice building there's so much catering to the the idiosyncratic preferences of funders and it takes up a ton of time and then you have to do reporting that shows like oh we spent the money on exactly the thing that we said we were going to spend it on to i think uh very burdensome degrees right there's certainly a case to be made that you should do some of that, but this is very burdensome. Many nonprofits complain about this. So Mackenzie Scott instead, what she does is she just makes up her list with her team. Her team then calls the recipients and says, you've just been allocated some millions of dollars from Mackenzie Scott, unrestricted, very little reporting.

Like you just got this giant windfall and you don't have to jump through all the hoops that you normally have to jump through to get funding. This is super transformative because what this does is displaces the stature and the power of Mackenzie as the donor and really says this is about just getting money to people. And to go back to our theme of trust, trusting these institutions to use it in the way that they see fit. So there's a lot of giving away not just of money, but of oversight and discretion, which is really a form of power. I think that's super admirable. And I think that many people should be taking her example and not putting nonprofits through all of these paces to try and get all this money.

And this is similar to when we were talking at the beginning of giving someone, hey, here's money. You know what to do best with it. I'm not worried that you're going to spend it on the wrong thing like alcohol. It's very similar to donating to an individual person. It gives them that trust and it deprioritizes you, the giver. That's good. Exactly. I think that's the best thing.

rust and it deprioritizes you, the giver. That's good. Exactly. I think that's the best thing. Where I think you see the limits is Mackenzie Scott has made many public statements where she talks about her concerns about social and economic justice, racial injustice, that she wants this money to go not to elite institutions, but to HBCUs, for example, or she wants it to go to local social service organizations, things that are not priorities for the billionaire class. These are really gifts that she's making to organizations that serve poor, working, and otherwise disenfranchised people in the United States. That's also great and great and unusual. The only problem is that for all of the money that she has and all the money that she's shoveling out the door, the metaphor I use in the book is Lucy and Ethel

at the chocolate factory. It's like they can't wrap the chocolate fast enough to get it out the door. She desperately wants to. Unfortunately, her holdings of Amazon stock mean that she's just going to keep accumulating money even faster than she can give it away. So that's one problem. Interesting. So she hasn't divested from the Amazon stock. She still has the money is growing. What?

Because Amazon stock price. Now, this is as far as I know. Like, I can't say I know the contents of her portfolio. portfolio but if we assume that it's from amazon stock then yes her uh her wealth is just growing at a faster rate than she could give it away even at this revolutionary pace but she could give it i mean it's possible to divest but she's sort of still using an endowment sort of model where she has a big pot and then the proceeds from the investment is what is being given away so she her metaphor is she wants to give until the safe is empty yeah now the problem with a safe is that there's like a static amount of money in there not like oh it gets refilled and then you have to like continuously empty it

but there's a different uh strain of issue here which is that she could she could of course officially divest herself of her stock or she could put a billion dollars into the Amazon Worker Strike Fund. She could use this money not in these downstream palliative ways where she gives it to nonprofits that are trying to make up for the deprivations that people face in a deeply unequal society. She could do something much more radical and confrontational with the amount of money that she has that would actually change labor relations, that would actually change policy, that might actually do something to prevent these conditions of inequality that so concern her. So this model of charitable giving as a mode of social justice, it kind of comes too late in the process. You would have to intervene upstream in our political system

in a more confrontational way. So I think as charity, as philanthropy, it's great. But as social justice, I think it's very limited. So, OK, that's really interesting because she's giving away the money in a way that deprioritizes her. But it sounds like what you're saying is the choices that she's making her priority, her priorities of who gets the money. It's still her team figuring it out. Yes. Are she still has some some biases or some things she maybe doesn't quite understand. Maybe just I would say some some limitations.

Yeah. Right. Like there's I would love to see her go farther. I would love to see her become a champion of, you know, workers rights. Yeah. That would be much more revolutionary, much more radical, and it wouldn't just be redistributing money. It would be genuinely redistributing power. So let's talk about what kind of donation that would be. I mean, if one were to actually donate

money to a place that would actually do these things, what sort of organizations are we talking about? So if we're talking about nonprofits, there are some excellent advocacy nonprofits. There's Americans for Financial Reform. There's Demand Progress. There's the Revolving Door Project. There are a number of nonprofits that really seek to weaken the power of corporations in government. And again, I have to echo, donating money to union strike funds would be an incredibly ballsy and revolutionary move. That would really be about giving workers the power to negotiate for their own conditions. Frankly, you could probably just give money to union networks more broadly. They all have operating foundations as well. So there's some confrontational giving that

is right on the line between charitable giving 501c3 and a form of like political giving you might even give it to a 501c4 that more actively does lobbying so that's one way to do it where you would actually be giving to places that are challenging our policies and our norms and our dynamics of labor and race and power, and not just from a kind of marginal position, but really confrontationally in the halls of power. There's still a problem there, because I imagine I take your point very well. And, you know, as a member of two unions, one of which SAG-AFTRA did not have the strike fund set up as, you know, as year round as the Writers Guild does and needed a lot of donations very quickly for that strike fund.

If, you know, they were to suddenly have, hey, we're on strike. Well, guess what? Here's 500 million dollars or whatever from Mackenzie Scott. That would have changed. That would have changed the strike enormously. It would have meant that, you know, actors could have. And by the way, we're talking today, the day after the strike was resolved. Yes. And congratulations on that. Thank you very much. I know you're very active on that board. I'm active in the Writers Guild. I'm just a member. OK, but I mean, I'm an active member, but I don't serve in any leadership role. But, you know, if there was a strike fund that was

10 times what it had been, the membership would have been in a very different place. Maybe could have held out even longer if necessary. I mean, hopefully not. But, you know, would have changed the facts on the ground. Right. Given the workers a lot more power. So I take that point. But I do wonder if she did have those priorities. If she said, you know, Mackenzie Scott divorces Jeff Bezos

and she, you know, reads a bunch of Jane McAlevey books and, you know, the Communist Manifesto and realizes that worker power is the most important thing and she wants to donate to those structural places. Right. I could see someone making the argument. Well, now she's following her her other set of ideological commitments and biases, which are, you know, still a fact about her. Right. And maybe there's something even more efficient she could have done. Like, isn't part of the problem that one person is calling the shots at all? Isn't wouldn't it be better just to, like, take the money away and let us vote on it you know what i mean or something like that of course that yes um expropriating wealth for public use is a huge part of this i think i'm thinking about what is in the short to medium horizon of possible yeah

so i totally take your point and agree with you. And there's stuff in the book about how we change tax incentives and how we change our political economy for a number of reasons, but one being so that philanthropy is not this highly stratified activity that's only done by the mega rich, but that we have greater equality and democratization of wealth such that we have democratization of giving as well. So I completely agree with you. That's really interesting. Democratization of giving.

So expand on that, please. So democratization of wealth really means a more equitable distribution of wealth. And democratization of giving would then mean more people had the discretionary income that they could participate, even in small ways, in giving. So one of the concepts that I put forth in the book is the idea of going beyond a living wage to a giving wage. So we have this idea of a living wage that would pay people. Apparently, we need a special term to say workers are actually supposed to be able to live on what they earn. This is already a paradigm change that we shouldn't need to have, but we're working on it. I suggest that we need to go even further and say people should be paid a giving wage. They

should be paid enough that they can also afford even nominally to give back. So we're recording this a couple of weeks before Giving Tuesday, for example, like this day after Thanksgiving, which is one of the largest days of giving in the year right before giving season starts. 30% of all gifts are made in December. So my sense is, giving is really one expression of the health of our democracy. And so I would want to see people paid more and with more robust social welfare policies that enable us all the security and the freedom to give to things that actually enable human flourishing in our communities. Yeah, if we were if we had a more equitable economy overall, then more people would be

able to donate and we wouldn't have the equity problems that we do with philanthropy because it would be overall more democratic. And actually, the labor movement is maybe a good example of this because folks who have union jobs generally, on average, earn more than folks who do not. And part of a small percentage, I forget what my total dues are, a percent or so of my salary goes to the union, which is a not-for-profit that works for the benefit of me and others in my industry and community. It's not quite a charity, but it's sort of an example of this where the labor movement is this durable nonprofit power center for workers' rights and for equality and generally green things and all the good things that we like. And it is funded by the fact that the workers, the workers each

chipping in a little bit, which they're able to do because they're all paid more. Exactly. And to expand, you know, yes, the unions are a crucial example of this. And then there are parts of our lives that really secure our quality of life. They might be our parks. They might be cultural institutions. They might be houses of worship. They might be recreation centers. If we think about those as power centers as well, places that really affirm human worth beyond our economic productivity, places that really cultivate human community and connection, that is a form of building power. That is a form of affirming human value and human worth beyond our economic productivity.

Yeah. Is it, I got to say though, you mentioned churches, right? And churches are a very, probably the most common form of community-based philanthropy. Many, many Americans are members of churches. Many churches have an ideology of, you should chip in a bit, you know, in some, some religions or some denominations that's tith's tithing where people donate a lot of their income. And I have to say, not all those churches are institutions that spend money in ways that benefit society. Some of them spend money in ways that benefit only the people who go to the church that protect wealth, that, you know, there are some very regressive churches out there. And, and so I'm wondering if our desire to have a version of philanthropy that is going to be good in every respect is a problem. I mean, I said a second ago, right? What if we just take the money away and we all vote how on what to do with it. Right. And that's very easy for me to say,

um, ha ha ha fuck the billionaires, take the money away. Let's all vote. Let's have it be democratic. Unfortunately, we do, we do currently have a system where we do that to some extent. It's called taxes. And I think if any single person in the country were to look at what taxes are spent on, every single person in the country would say, I fucking hate a lot of this. Right. And that's because democracy is a fucking mess and people do not agree. And there's a lot of assholes in every society and there's power imbalances in society. There's hierarchies and there's, youbalances in society there's hierarchies and there's you know people are corporations are able to say oh hold on there's a lot of money being given out why don't we get some for ourselves we're powerful enough that you know we can uh

you know military industrial complex and all that shit right um and like we it sort of seems like in order to find that path to a positive philanthropy, we need to solve every power based problem in society, which seems like a tall order. When you put it that way. I'm very sorry. Do you have an answer to this question in your book? It's called how philanthropy, how to fix philanthropy, how to fix everything. But I guess to me, I see having this diversified set of tactics of how we can use money for social good kind of offsets some of the challenges that you just listed. So there's a story in the book that points out exactly what you said, that like even our democratically elected governments are not always going to have the interests of human flourishing at heart, right? They might be hostile. And so, you know, as much as the leftist in me is concerned that what I'm saying is,

you know, libertarian or otherwise mistrustful of government, I do think there's something to be said for pluralism. So the story is that in the late 90s, Rudy Giuliani, the then mayor of New York, wanted to sell off about 140 plots of land that were allocated for community gardens. And he wanted to sell them to developers. And his argument was somehow like, we need this land, we need it for housing. These gardens are just, you know, these elite spaces that are just kind of draining public resources. And really what he meant was this is not economically productive. This is not right. So and these sort of spaces, by the way, are one of the things that make New York City

a wonderful city that it is. This is a city where we're recording in New York right now. You walk around like, oh, there's a tiny little park, right? Just like the size of one little building. Right. At some point, they knocked down a building and built a little park there. And it's one of the beautiful things about this place. Not only did they knock down a building, but it was actually largely black and Latinx communities that took over vacant lots in the 1970s and turned them into these gardens.

So they're actually our legacies of, you know, people of color and grassroots reclaiming of public space and building their communities. So, uh, what the short version of what saved these spaces is, uh, a fundraising campaign spearheaded by Bette Midler, um, that for $2.4 million bought these plots and then donated them to a land trust, donated them to New York city land trust. So there's this way in which philanthropy can be this lever of using money for like humanism, even in the in the undesirable moments when our governments do not have that in their core interests. So you actually feel that philanthropy is not by itself bad it's it's the way we've been going about it it's the over prioritization and that there is a version of philanthropy that would be productive like there is a thing that warren buffett could do that would be net positive so

the the best story i can give you to exemplify this, it's the last part of the book, and it's a profile of LeBron James. So LeBron has a network of institutions that his foundation has helped start in Akron, Ohio. And the first of them is the I Promise School. And I want to just say really importantly off the top, the I Promise School is a public school. It has a collective bargaining agreement for the teachers. It is not a charter school. That might be the most revolutionary thing about it.

So let's be clear. This is philanthropy in partnership with public goods, with like democratically funded public goods, public institutions, public schools. So there's the I Promise School that has public governance, but the LeBron James Family Foundation and its partners funded this huge suite of wraparound services. They have food pickup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the families. There's a barber shop for the parents of the kids, and every kid gets a bike and a helmet. Wow.

Why? Because when LeBron was asked about the bikes, he said, when I was a kid, having a bike was what made me feel free. That to me is like, how do you use money to value the unquantifiable, the human spirit, the intangible? There's no balance sheet that can quantify feeling free. And that's what the philanthropy that he gives can provide alongside the very critical basic services. And is there something that, because you say that and it makes me think, well, you know, that made LeBron feel free. Maybe something else would make some other kid feel free. Absolutely. Maybe a fucking, I felt free when I had a super Nintendo.

And so, so is there something about this that makes us avoid that pitfall of LeBron deciding for everybody else what they should have? No, there's, I'm not avoiding that pitfall. I'm not going to pretend that we are. Um, it's true. He does decide. Um, but it's a very embedded decision. It's embedded in his upbringing, in his relationships, in his knowledge. Because he's from there. At the opening of I Promise, he said, I know what the kids who go to the school are going through. I know the dreams they have. I know the nightmares they have. So very deeply empathetic and connected about that. So it's not just, I woke up and I had this quixotic idea that we should just give kids bikes. No, I do know because I was this kid. And so he wanted to kind of parachute into Newark with a hundred million dollars and revolutionize their school system only to create redistricting maps that didn't take into account where their kids would need to cross highways to get to school.

This is one small example. Because he's not he's not from there. LeBron would make that mistake. LeBron's like, no way. No kids crossing that like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These people go to the schools like we I know how the community works. Exactly. As opposed to parachuting in. Exactly. I know how the community works. And I'm going to partner with the institutions that are governed by like public officials, you know, public funding.

So there's not there's also not that kind of takeover of like now I'm going to become the Mr. Potter of Akron, you know, who just like controls everything. There's a real interconnectedness to how he does it. And that to me is what I would like philanthropy to do is to exist in equilibrium and in partnership, but with a very unique understanding of its role that like we absolutely need government for, I say in the book, we need government for bread and philanthropy for roses. So expand on that, please. Absolutely. Now, of course, this is much too neat of a divide. There's lots of places where this, you know, can blend together in ways you have to work

out. But bread and roses is, as you might know, the union slogan of we don't just need sustenance. We need quality of life. We need things that bring us joy. We need culture. We need music. We need things that connect us to our souls. And so, again, my sense is like we absolutely need a government that does a much better

job than our current government does of providing for our basic needs. But we also need roses. And I don't know that we can necessarily assume that our government will have the means or the priorities that allow for that. And philanthropy has the flexibility to do that if it does so in proper deference to the authorities of our government. And so let's talk about that deference. Yeah.

Deference to the authorities of our government, meaning in the case of Akron, the democratically elected school board, probably the parent associations, PTAs, whatever, all the various community organs that know what is needed there. Right. All the things that make it very ineffective altruism, right? Like all of these kinds of these, there are relationships of friction and negotiation and solidarity and disjuncture that have to be contested. They have to be like democratically contested. That's what it means to be in relationship.

But you're doing so with a sense that like you are ultimately there to help provide the things that keep people human, the things that bring them joy, the things that really connect them to one another. And so there's a humility to that and a clear sense of purpose. Yes. one another. And so there's a humility to that and a clear sense of purpose. Yes. And especially when you are in deference to the organizations within the government that are specifically democratic, right. That are, that are coming from the bottom up. I mean, when I was saying, Hey, a lot of the stuff in the budget of the federal government, I don't like a lot of that

is driven by the parts that are not democratic. That's driven by corporations having too much power and the people not having enough power. And if we instead are working in deference to the parts of the government that are democratic, where the people do have a voice, then we're on the right path. I think we are. I think we are. So for this Giving Tuesday. Yes. Tuesday. Yes. If people, you know, I around this time of year, I do think about how fortunate I am to be doing a podcast and YouTube videos and to have a little bit of disposable income. And I want to make sure that I am sharing it with others and making the world a better place in ways that

matter to me. What do you suggest that people think about? Where do they start with their own philanthropic activities to make sure they're not falling into these? Because again, I spent five years following the effective altruists and I don't mind that my money went to bed nets, but now I'm like, I could have done a little better. There's a balance to strike between giving for the world we have and giving for the world we want to build. So I would never say just give to these sort of evergreen pursuits of culture and recreation and parks because that might feel tone deaf based on the serious local, national, international crises that we find ourselves in. So I don't want to be absolutist about this, but I would say, if anything, strive for a balance between being

responsive to the world that we have and responsive to genuine vulnerability and genuine crisis that is readily accessible to all of us if we look around, but also consider what can you give and where can you give that keeps you in relationship with others that allows you and others to gather, to explore, to flourish, to grow and connect? What institutions can you give that might be locally, they might be nationally, but what can you do that kind of fosters human flourishing with your giving? Do you have an example or even one from your own life of something like that sort of local thing that folks can be in partnership with? Absolutely.

So, again, in New York, I support my community garden. That's a small thing. I also support museums ranging from ones that are, you know, the name brands that might be like the Met or the Brooklyn Museum. that might be like the Met or the Brooklyn Museum. And I especially give to those that are freely accessible to others that like really allow for free admission, because that feels the most sort of democratic and inclusive way of like sharing those quality, that quality of life with others. I have been on the board of something called the Chautauqua Institution, the Young People's Board. That's a place I grew up going that really fostered these values in me. I come from Cleveland, not far from Akron, so shout out to Northeast Ohio. And so I would give to local social service organizations there and also to

museums there. And I should say, not just ones that are, again, those name brands, but maybe smaller ones. They might be local things that work with the schools. They might be a dance troupe that meets at your local community center that people really value or a recreation center. Again, stuff that brings people together in a way that I think is missing so much of the time. And in terms of building worker power or power for average people, we were talking about, wouldn't it be great if Mackenzie Scott donated to organizations like that? What sort of organizations are you thinking of and how do people go about finding them? Well, first of all, I would say definitely look and see if there are workers on strike and just give to those strike funds. Like that's definitely a great place to start. The strike funds that the union asks you to donate to. Very important.'s definitely a great place to start. The strike funds that the union

asks you to donate to very important. That's a great point that you need to, if you want to support a strike, you have to look at how is the union asking you to support? Because sometimes there'll be other funds around the edges that are not really you defer to the union. Yeah, I agree completely. And so the nonprofits that I mentioned before that I think are really smart about translating advocacy on behalf of the workers and the sort of populace of the United States are really great. That would be Demand Progress. That would be Americans for Financial Reform. They're really good at translating demands of the people into real policy. So those would be my other recommendations there. I'll tell you my own part for my donations this year is I've given to the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, Collective, I forget which, which is a group that anybody around the country can call and get connected with an organizer if you're trying to unionize. EWOC really great organization that is comes out of a, a union effort.

And I am looking for a, a trans legal defense charity. Cause that's, I think a very important legal issue right now. And it's one, and those are folks who are like really doing the very basic on the ground, like legal and political work to get some of the folks who need power built in our

society, most the power that they need. But I'm like looking to, as you say, find a place that I can have a relationship with where it's not just like, oh, hey, I'm, you know, you know, take the money and run or whatever. Right. But like, you know, where, when, where are the places that are working most closely in their own community, not just doing the, the parachuting in like top down, uh, work, but, you know, actually providing legal aid to, to folks who need it, you know? I do. And I, I totally second that recommendation. And I think that will sort of require listeners to look in their own communities and kind of just use your sort of embedded networks and your embedded knowledge about, you know, where do you feel things are really making a difference and helping people flourish in the place where you live? That's so wonderful.

Amy, the book is called The Price of Humanity. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people, it's out December 5th. It's out December 5th. Where else can people find it? Where else can they follow your work? You can find the book is at Bookshop.

The book is also in your local independent bookstore. The book is anywhere you can buy books. You can find me on social media at Amy the Shill. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. And you can also find me at my website, amybestshiller.com.

And I really look forward to hearing from listeners what your thoughts are. Thank you so much for being here. It's been wonderful. Such a pleasure. Thanks, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Amy Shiller for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up a copy of her book, you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books.

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