We are almost two decades into the age of billionaire philanthropy and what’s results has it produced? Can you point to any area where it’s really changed the world?

I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.

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keeda 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a common refrain of many people, but I believe it is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of philanthropy and charities in general. They don't really exist to "fix" problems, they are mostly a band-aid over the structural issues that lead to social problems. The long-term solutions to most of these problems involve policy changes rather than "spot fixes"

Like, funding a homeless shelter or the Trevor Project won't fix the problems causing homelessness or LGBTQ teen suicides. But there are enough people with immediate problems who we do want to support them somehow until policy changes happen, if ever.

You're right that the Gates Foundation is one of the few that has achieved some lasting changes, but I would say that is because their MO is quite different from what many NGO's do. This is based on second-hand knowledge from somebody who works there, so I'm not sure if they do this exclusively, but they strongly prefer to partner with the local governments to introduce highly targeted interventions.

This simultaneously makes it extremely slow and frustrating to operate (especially in countries with dysfunctional governments, which is where help is most needed) and ironically reduces the leverage of money (which is a problem when you have a mandate to spend X% of your money annually!) but also means that whenever any change happens it is generally structural and long-lasting.

There are many other organizations that operate with similar long-lasting principles, but it seems to me most focus on immediate, short-term support, which may be a function of the limited funding and skills of the people available to them.

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rayiner 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> They don't really exist to "fix" problems, they are mostly a band-aid over the structural issues that lead to social problems. The long-term solutions to most of these problems involve policy changes rather than "spot fixes"

Non-profits are 12% of GDP, over $3.5 trillion. Excluding hospitals, universities, and churches, leaves over $2 trillion in non-profit expenditures. Of that, about $300 billion comes from the government. That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.

My dad spent his career in non-profits working on public health in third world countries. These NGOs were able to work with highly dysfunctional foreign governments to achieve real and measurable improvements in some of the poorest countries in the world. Which is why it blows my mind that non-profits spending vastly more money domestically can’t work with e.g. the government of Baltimore to deliver meaningful improvements to the abysmal literacy rates in that city, or work in infant morality in inner cities.

The key difference it seems to me is the lack of accountability in domestic non-profits. The U.S., EU, Japan, etc., care how their foreign aid dollars are used. Every project is evaluated for effectiveness in quantitative terms. That culture of measured accountability seems entirely absent in domestic non-profits.

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laughing_man 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't surprise men to find we spend trillions on nonprofits and get little in return. There is an enormous amount of corruption. More than forty years ago I knew a woman who was cold calling people to raise money for research into a canine disease.

If you donated a dollar, she got fifty cents. Her boss got twenty five cents, the company got their cut, the university took a little, so did the department and the professor. By the time it came down to some poor grad student looking at slides there was only a penny or two going to pay him/her. This kind of thing combines the worst of both government and private business.

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keeda 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.

But that's the thing, the money is not helpful when it comes to policy issues. As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will. I can only surmise that the reason more US non-profits don't achieve lasting change is because they are not able to or they are not trying to.

This is not to say they are deliberately being ineffective, e.g. consider that inner city infant mortality rates have socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism. Offhand, I really can't see how non-profits would be able to address these with even billions of dollars.

Of note, a sibling comment mentions the book "Winner Takes All" and links its wikipedia page which has this quote:

> The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism's rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, "Give back," which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system – surgery that might threaten their privileges. The Aspen Consensus, I believe, tries to market the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice."

Not saying I agree entirely, but that is the kind of thing that could lead to billions in spending without achieving lasting structural changes.

	▲	rayiner 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will Lasting change comes down to data-driven programs that work and the money to implement them. As long as you’re not asking for money and meet the community you’re working with where they are,[1] politics is mostly a red herring. My dad worked on projects that achieved incredible results in Bangladesh, for example, even though the government of the country was a complete clusterfuck the entire time. > socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism. The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. There may be overarching “factors” that contribute to a result, but there’s usually an immediate cause of a problem that you can tackle directly with an effective program. Mississippi, for example, is now #3 in the country for NAEP 4th grade reading and math scores for black students. It’s #1 for reading and #2 for math for Hispanic students: https://mdek12.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2025/01/NAEPR.... Mississippi didn’t “solve poverty and racism.” It implemented a program that identified the immediate cause of certain problems and fixed them. [1] Effective programs avoid creating political problems. When my dad was designing maternal health programs for Bangladeshi villagers, he met them where they were instead of where he thought they should be. For example, it turns out rural women wouldn’t use newly built clinics for giving birth because they didn’t trust “big city doctors.” So the program developed relationships with local midwives and traditional healers, who the women already trusted, and had them get training from the doctors and refer high risk pregnancies to the clinics while handling routine deliveries in the traditional way.

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gnerd00 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

depends on your lawyers.. the reporting requirements in the USA are real. What the report says, who is named.. a much broader topic.

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raybb 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds like you may have read it but the book Winner Takes All is about this topic and pretty enjoyable.

I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

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insane_dreamer 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

didn't it start with Carnegie and Rockefeller?

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skybrian 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Gates Foundation also put a lot of money into education in the US, but my understanding is that it’s had mixed results. Public health seems to be easier.

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hermitShell 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I understand Gates has also helped in reviving Nuclear power, from reading news on this site and others. Smaller, updated designs that don't face quite the same level of pressure from regulators.

If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.

Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...

There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...

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cossatot 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We're a century into it at least, even in nominal dollar terms, starting with Rockefeller as the first billionaire.

I don't know whether John Arnold is spread too thin or not, but he's certainly top caliber and does a lot to measure progress before/during investment in various causes (including education). He also seems to be more agnostic on what the most appropriate solution may be at the beginning of the process.

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fsckboy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>We are almost two decades into the age of billionaire philanthropy

10 decades, Rockefeller was the first billionaire 100 yrs ago, and also a philanthropist.