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Stuart Buck's avatar

Great essay, and it reminds me of many discussions I had while leading research at Arnold Ventures. These days, I'm working to improve science funding at the Good Science Project (with my own funding from Patrick Collison), and it is dismaying to me how many philanthropists just want to dump more money into the current system rather than think about creative alternatives or about ways to change the system. Most recently, Ken Griffin gave $300 million to the richest university in the world--Harvard. He could have done so much better than that.

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Daniel Oppenheimer's avatar

I guess I wonder in what ways you see your perspective -- that entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial spirit can revolutionize and vastly improve on the philanthropic realm -- as distinct from the tradition of successful entrepreneurs thinking that the main thing we need to do to fix politics is hand them over to entrepreneurs and invest the political process with more entrepreneurial spirit. Because that latter tradition, which deploys much the same language as your post, has been a pretty demonstrable failure, historically speaking. I'm sure you could find examples of successful businessman politicians, but the greatest leaders have been great politicians, typically with vast political experience. Because it's a distinct realm with its own distinct set of rules and incentives, and the skills that work in one space don't perfectly or even mostly translate over to the other.

You write, "Treating philanthropic work as if it’s a totally separate endeavor than entrepreneurship is a huge mistake." Feels like a lot hangs on "totally" in this sentence. Not totally, surely, but maybe "dramatically" or "substantially"? Aren't the monetary rewards of success radically different in the two spheres? Isn't failure much less penalized in the philanthropic space? Aren't the pay scales dramatically different? And even if you could equalize the pay scales at your own non-profit, are the jobs prepping the employees to make the jump to higher paying jobs in other sectors? Aren't there different skill sets and training paths toward competence and sophistication in the different sectors, even if they're not as different as people assume? Aren't the legal and political structures within which philanthropy operates very different?

It's not that I disagree with your larger critique of much of philanthropy. I was looking at the Cicero Institute projects, and it all seems like great work. What I question is the premise that there's an immense amount of low hanging fruit in this space that's just waiting to be picked by entrepreneur/innovator types going into philanthropy. Hasn't the experience of, say, Mark Zuckerberg and the Newark schools, or Bill Gates and school reform more broadly, suggested that it's incredibly difficult to use philanthropy to change the world for the better at scale.

More to the point, aren't you setting yourself up for failure if you begin with the premise that everyone else has failed because they're too old or too stupid?

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