No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

by Linsey McGoey

Philanthro-capitalism: How charity became big business

The charitable sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the global economy. Nearly half of the more than 85,000 private foundations in the United States have come into being since the year 2000. Just under 5,000 more were established in 2011 alone. This deluge of philanthropy has helped create a world where billionaires wield more power over education policy, global agriculture, and global health than ever before.

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift , author and academic Linsey McGoey puts this new golden age of philanthropy under the microscope—paying particular attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As large charitable organizations replace governments as the providers of social welfare, their largesse becomes suspect. The businesses fronting the money often create the very economic instability and inequality the foundations are purported to solve. We are entering an age when the ideals of social justice are dependent on the strained rectitude and questionable generosity of the mega-rich.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, Sociology, Society, Political Science, Social Science

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2015

About the author

Linsey McGoey (b. 1978) is a Canadian sociologist and academic based in England. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is known for having written about philanthropy in her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift and co-editing the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies with Matthias Gross. Her next book, The Unknowers: How Elite Ignorance Rules the World, was published in 2019.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a number of books on philanthropy over the last couple of years, but I think this is the one I would most highly recommend if you were thinking of reading just one. I think that is because it uses Carnegie and Bill Gates as examples to show how philanthropy has been used to make the world in the image of very wealthy people.

Both men made their fortunes by using monopolistic practices and often, if not actually breaking the law, coming so close so as to leave a taint and stench of anything but an excess of morality. Both then sought a kind of redemption by giving away large proportions of their wealth. But this ‘giving away’ idea is complicated.

First of all, there are tax benefits in giving away money. At one point in this the author says that if an insanely wealthy person gives away $100 million, they might save $75 million in taxes. You might think, ‘well, we are still $25 million better off than if they hadn’t given’ – the only problem is that we don’t get to decide where any of that money is spent. It might all go to Yale, or it might go to the Opera. Money paid in taxes is much more likely to redistribute wealth more than donations to ‘charities’ do – that is, taxes tend to help the poor more than money rich people overall donate to charities – and this is because a rich person often gives their tax deductable money to their favourite form of recreation, which doesn’t always help the poor in anyway at all.

But a bigger problem is that rich donors have an out-sized influence on the overall direction of many of the organisations they support. So, even when these organisations are set up to do good, or as Gates seems to like to say, ‘to do god’s work’, their preferences can override the choices that experts might otherwise have made. I’m going to give a few examples here.

The first is in an area I’m particularly interested in – education. A while ago Gates became a bit obsessed with small schools. He noticed that small schools were often at the top of the achievement distribution curve. It is not too hard to come up with a series of reasons why this might be the case. Smaller schools have more intimate relationships with their students, they are more like a community, maybe the students all feel like family and so help each other out more, perhaps teachers get a better opportunity to more deeply engage with their students – rather seeing them as some faceless hoard. All of these reasons sound plausible enough. However, the actual reason is ‘basic statistics’. If you have a large school, it is going to be populated by lots of kids and having lots of kids will mean kids at all levels of ability. Which in turn means a large school is likely to end up pretty close to ‘the average school’ – pretty much in the same way that if I toss a coin a million times, I am likely to come pretty close to 50:50 heads to tails. But if you have a small school, and a couple of well-educated families send their kids to the school, that could tip the school’s results right up to the top of the achievement curve – in much the same way that if I toss a coin five times I might end up with all heads, and no tails. Small samples are easily skewed, large ones, not so much. If Bill had looked, he would have noticed that small schools were clustered at the bottom of the achievement curve too, and for exactly the same reason, they just ended up with more tails than heads by the luck of the draw. It is easier for a small school to over or under achieve than it is for a large school.

But Bill was more attracted by the interesting and plausible reasons for small schools doing better than he was with the boring statistical reasons – and so he pumped millions into researching and supporting small schools. All good, you say, so what if he was wrong? Money was still going to schools and so the world is still a better place. Yeah, except for what happened next. One day the results started coming in, and those weren’t so good. So, Bill decided to cut funding to the project. It’s his money after all. Except that the schools that had come to rely on that money were left high and dry. They had become victims of the whims of a wealthy donor with a short attention span, something perhaps caused by his spending too much time interacting with screen-based technologies.

But even whim isn’t the worst of the problems here. It would be hard to criticise a billionaire who sets out to eradicate polio or to end malaria or to vaccinate Africa. What could you possibly have against that? Well, again, the problem is that we are dealing with an all-too-human being, and one who has no real expertise in the area of health that he has come to dominate. He also appears to be doing a lot of this work, at least in part, to be recognised and remembered for it. Look, many of us want immortality of some sort or other, I guess. However, his immortality can complicate the lives of many, many people. An example given in this book is the efforts that are being made to fully eradicate polio. This has been a major focus of Gates and although this isn’t literally said in the book, it might be because it would make for a particularly good news story if a diseases with a name everyone knows ends up getting eradicated due to his efforts. However, in seeking to fully eradicate polio, other diseases that cause much more harm (and deaths) are being ignored or sidelined.

The problems get more difficult because people who are rich tend to think that how they became rich is natural, inevitable and an indication of their own virtue and merit. And again, perhaps we are all deluded in our own ways – but the impact of, say, my delusions are likely to be fairly minor – whereas someone who has a wealth in the order of $100 billion, they can basically weaponise their delusions. Now, for virtually all of his life Gates has spent his time protecting copywrite laws – his wealth depended upon it, so it is hardly surprising he is fairly keen on the subject. However, defending patents and copywrite laws in the face of the crushing poverty of the global south isn’t necessarily in the best interests of these people. The examples given mostly involve him seeking technological fixes for the problems of the developing world – the creation of higher yield seeds or of patent medicines – and these come with a price tag. Charity is a business in so many ways. But here the lines between aid and business become particularly blurred. The example is discussed again here of the Indian farmers forced by the high cost of Monsanto crops to commit suicide by drinking the pesticide they need to purchase and that has driven them into crushing poverty.

Another example is HIV/AIDS where he has not supported the use of drugs as a preventative (some antiretrovirals reduce the viral load in a persons bodily fluids and this in turn means those infected are less likely to pass on the virus to their sexual partners). But Gates has strenuously opposed this. Now, there might be many reasons for him doing this – one of which might be his stated concern that since there is only so much money to go around it would be more effective to pursue prevention rather than cures. However, as someone quoted here says, “access to ARVs (antiretrovirals), would be a threat to intellectual property, the regime of which he staunchly supports”.

This book is fascinating, not least because it covers so many aspects of Gates’ activities – agriculture, health, education – while also linking the discussion around these back to his employment, investment and other business histories.

The biggest concern here is that Gates has bought his way onto the world stage. He has more power than the majority of world leaders, maybe more than all of them, given he has not fixed time to retire. Also unlike those world leaders, he is almost entirely unaccountable. At one point in this book an exchange is quoted between Gates and Piketty. Piketty had just given a speech in which he called for a wealth tax. Gates is quoted as saying to him after the speech, “I love everything that’s in your book, but I don’t want to pay more tax”. Piketty is quoted as saying, “I think he sincerely believes he’s more efficient than the government, and you know, maybe his is sometimes”. Yeah, maybe he is… but there are no consequences for the times when he is not more efficient. And because he has so much power, that becomes a real problem.

[David Sasaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Talk about a well-timed release. Linsey McGoey’s No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy came out just weeks before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and set off an Internet-wide firestorm about philanthropy and its relationship with inequality and democracy.

This was almost the book I had been waiting for. But it only goes half way, pointing out what’s wrong in billionaire philanthropy without any substantive analysis of how to make things right, or at least slightly better. It builds on the work of other thoughtful critics, including Rob Reich, Mark Dowie, Gara LaMarche, and Joanne Barkan, and applies it to the work of the Gates Foundation (disclosure: my former employer). But it doesn’t offer any new arguments or solutions. And, as Andy Beckett points out in his review, it doesn’t seem like McGoey spoke to many Gates Foundation employees to better understand how the structure and management of the foundation contribute to its shortcomings.

McGoey depicts those of us who work at foundations as naive, idealistic “TED Heads” that jet around in business class from one to the next faddish conference without ever understanding the roots or realities of the problems we purport to address. Sure, you can find those types at many foundations, and sadly their ilk is on the rise as foundations increasingly recruit MBA generalists on the assumption that they are more efficient and "outcome focused." But if she had spoken with more foundation employees, McGoey would have discovered that many of philanthropy’s toughest critics are those of us that work on the inside — even at the Gates Foundation. Each time we go through an existential crisis about our work, we ask ourselves a question that McGoey mostly avoids: given the current political realities, if not this, then what?

The strongest section of the book looks at the implications of the Gates Foundation’s choice to work with rather than against Big Pharma to make progress against diseases that affect the poorest. That decision is rooted in Bill Gates’ belief that philanthropy can help attract “the smartest minds to the most important problems.” It’s a noble goal that necessitates some ugly trade-offs. Supporters of the foundation’s partnerships with pharmaceutical companies argue that, as a result, poor people get access to new medicines faster and cheaper while pharmaceutical companies gain access to new markets. Critics, like McGoey, point out that Big Pharma is making record profits that it uses to lobby governments for strict patent protections against generic equivalents — government-sanctioned monopolies that deny life-saving medicine to poor people. Hepatitis C, for example, affects 150 million people worldwide and kills 700,000 people each year. There is a treatment, but it will cost you $1,000 per daily pill — $84,000 for the full treatment. The state of Illinois has paid tens of millions for the drug, and was forced to restrict Medicaid patients from treatment. Generic versions of the drug in developing countries (where 73% of all people with hepatitis C live) could be as low as $100 for the full treatment, leading to healthier citizens and more productive economies.

I fully agree with McGoey that patent protections shouldn’t keep people from accessing medicines that could save their lives. It was one of the areas I was most interested in when I worked at Open Society Foundations (yes, an evil private foundation). But even as I nodded in agreement, I was frustrated that McGoey didn't substantively address the tradeoffs of working with versus against Big Pharma, and that she didn't dig into the details of Gates Foundation’s Global Access policy. The foundation’s approach to intellectual property is much more nuanced than just “patent protection at all costs."

She also joins the chorus of voices demanding that the foundation’s trust divest from oil companies, without recognizing research that shows that divestment campaigns rarely work. All that activist effort to get private foundations to divest from oil companies is a distraction from what would really make a difference: higher taxes on carbon extraction and consumption, and cheaper renewable energy.

To the degree that McGoey offers a solution, it’s that wealthy people should pay more taxes, and governments should provide quality public services and a basic safety net. I agree, and both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are on record for supporting higher taxes. (Buffet has been especially vocal.) But McGoey’s faith in governments to be the sole financier of public goods, scientific research and the arts makes me think she’s never lived in a developing country. It’s a model that works well at the University of Essex, where she works, but just ask researchers, activists and artists in Mexico what they have to go through to get government support.

Finally, when I ponder the book’s central premise that private foundations amount to unaccountable, institutionalized plutocracy (and this is something I think about frequently), I ultimately come to the same conclusion. Private foundations aren’t the problem, and getting rid of them isn’t the solution. As Larry Kramer (disclosure: president of the Hewlett Foundation, where I work) argues, the problem is large aggregations of wealth. Allocating those large aggregations of wealth to private foundations (compared to, says, campaign finance, lobbying or luxury yachts) is the least of our worries.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who works in philanthropy, and to anyone interested in the relationship between wealth, idealism and democracy. It reveals the many contradictions rampant in my field. McGoey is a deep, subtle thinker who rewards her readers with great passages from 19th century literature, sociological theory and political philosophy. It’s an especially important read for all those attracted to the hype of social entrepreneurship and the next TED conference. For those of us who have been pondering philanthropy’s shortcomings for some time, however, this is not the book to help us advance our thinking on how to improve philanthropy and its relationship with democracy.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, is an interesting, if flawed, critique on philanthro-capitalism. By critique, I mean a scathing, furious rebuke of organizations like the Gate's Foundation, and their upper-crust supporters, who McGoey refers to as "TED-Heads." McGoey is highly critical in her book, and makes some excellent criticisms of a flawed system. For example, she is critical of Gates support for privatized schooling, metrics on teaching performance that instigate disciplinary action for poor scores, privatized online teaching, pharmaceutical exposure to disease reduction, and more. Many of these articles are interesting, but McGoey is so venomous in her criticism, it may turn many readers away.

McGoey is obviously operating from an ideological standpoint. She is highly critical of private companies, and any corporate participation in governance or education, which seems a bit overzealous. Although private institutions are not always the most efficient, the most successful, or even the most competent institutions to handle issues, they may not be the worst either. McGoey seems to be criticizing for the sake of criticizing, offering little in the way of fact or figure in some of her arguments. She criticizes the Gates Foundation for combating Polio in the developing world, for example, by stating that there are more important diseases, such as measles, that should be eradicated instead. I wonder if she would criticize a measles campaign because there are other disease besides that as well.

I could go on and on here. This book was interesting, and I do recommend it. It explores the field of philanthropy, which is often heaped with praise, and yet abused as a tax dodge, or an integration point to make vulnerable people reliant on certain industry tech, or a way to advertise and improve corporate image, as opposed to what it should be; a way to alleviate poverty, reduce disease impact and improve lives. Philanthropy can rightly be criticized as the table scraps of the rich, as McGoey points out. A quote from this book, attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith, compares the relationship between philanthropists and the poor as a horse and sparrow. The horse is fed oats, and the sparrows feed from the road. This too, is how I view philanthro-capitalism. It is easy to praise the generosity of billionaires who have too much money to know what to do with it. But many of these people, Gates included, grew so powerful off of tax avoidance schemes, monopoly power, selfish lobbying and overseas workers, to name just a few of the accusations leveled at Microsoft under Gates. A proper wealth redistribution framework within a nation is much more powerful than random table-scraps from a wealthy man. It is better for nations that receive foreign donations to develop their economies and support their citizens there own way, as opposed to receiving aid reliant on foreign cultural norms and practices that may be alien to the aid receivers.

Frankly, this is a book that I liked in a lot of ways. But it was also scathingly written, poorly sourced and ideologically driven. A scathing critique of philanthro-capitalism is much needed, but this short treatise just barely scratches the surface, and does not do justice to the issue. McGoey, however, wrote an interesting book, and I could hesitantly recommend it to those interested in economics, philanthropy, and social justice topics.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philanthro-capitalism, the highest stage of capitalism?

[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].

I like philanthro-capitalist ventures - however catastrophic, however tragic - because they represent a laboratory-like dénouement or epiphany of what I understand is the real nature of capitalism (as opposed to the mercantilism of the people).

The book - which also has the ambition to be a primer on neoliberalism, and as such covers too much ground - shows us a few billionnaires in action (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Soros, Buffet, Branson, Gates), and how a few quick fixes for the world's problems (including social entreprenership and micro-finance) muddle through the media, the TED church, the exclusive policy clubs, and eventually wreak havoc on innocent lives.

The chapters on the Gates Foundation's quick fixes for the US education system, polio, or Africa's shuttered agricultural markets are breathtaking. Apocalyptic chain reactions of unintended consequences are triggered by half-baked plans supported by outrageously generous cash-outs. And they reveal that the real aim of grand capitalism is not profit, but to wield the power needed to shape society as it pleases. This is the case for example of our lord and master, Jeff Bezos, who has put together a monster organization that is systematically making losses and nonetheless thrives on the equity market, which hails its success at disrupting whatever it can disrupt.

The book's major weakness (feel free to skip the amateurish part on the anthropological theory of the gift) consists in wanting to see profit seeking motives in the Gates Foundation's policy choices and partnerships (with Goldman Sachs, Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, Monsanto and Coca Cola), where they are just the result of what in foundation-speak is called 'leverage', i.e. the idea that a measure of a charitable programme's success is its ability to catalyse powerful alliances. Gates teams up with Monsanto because it's a 'like-minded' organization, which shares his fierce views on intellectual property and the ability of technology to dish out 'solutions' for society's problems (which when applied to reality never go to plan). Omnipotence, not money, is the ultimate end of grant and profit making.

How can omnipotence grant-making be curbed? The author suggests revoking the tax allowance system now associated with charitable giving. But this would only affect the charitable giving of the people, leaving omnipotence giving undisturbed. What is needed is probably for grant-making organizations to have to mandatorily achieve a 'license to operate' granted to them by the beneficiaries, who should be systematically involved in deciding how the generous gift should affect their community and institutions, both in developed and developing countries.

The gift is not free, not because the donor is seeking to make a profit from it, but beacuse the act of giving the gift is intrinsically undemocratic. The beneficiary does not even know the donation is taking place, and cannot turn it down. Allowing the beneficiaries the choice to accept the gift and dictate how it should be spent could make the gift more free. For more on the democratization of philanthropy, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty , thoughtful poor people with equal justice call the problem of riches.”
― R H Tawney
This quote is from the first page, it should give you a sense of what the book is about.

interesting thinking here. more to follow.

Guardian Review- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015...
Financial Times Review-
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4ce4d9...

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book 10 stars if I could. This is one of the best non-fiction books I've read ever. McGoey does an impressive job of gathering her facts and basing her arguments on clear data. I hesitate to say "arguments," because I feel like McGoey was actually very well-balanced in her perspective. She presents a very fair and thorough view of her subjects, and I thought she was very fair with her depiction of Bill Gates.

This is not a tirade against Gates and his "Billioniare Boys Club." Instead, this is a history of philanthropy, including an excellent analysis of gift-giving, the legacies of Gates' predecessors like Carnegie and Rockefeller, and a careful examination of the state of philanthrocapitalism today. She points out the hypocrises and double-standards so rampant in that privileged world, and she looks closely at the consequences of relying on individual "benefactors" to provide the services that governments often struggle to.

I love the chapter titles, too -- they are apt and witty. The book begins the introduction titled "Winning Paradise Economically" and then moves on to "Big Men" (the wealthier-than-thou club of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gates, Walton, Broad, et al.), "TED Heads" (the elitism and the censorship of TED Talks, Davos and other similar events where the super-rich applaud their own efforts to save the world), "Mandeville's Bastards" (nope, trickle-down economics doesn't work), "Pintsize Profit-Makers" (making money off of kids by destroying the U.S. public education system), "God's Work" (Gates' oft-misguided work on health issues), "Forgive Them, Bastiat" (hello, Tea Party!), "Always Coca-Cola" (the corporate connections of philanthropists and all those dirty little secrets), and finally the conclusion titled "The Selfish Gift."

I could have underlined every sentence in this book, but I'll only share two of my favorite quotes from the conclusion:

"[Thiel and his fellow philanthrocapitalists] defend protectionist patent policies even as they exhort developing nations to open up their own borders. They exploit tax loopholes that deplete government financial reserves even as they complain about the seeming inability of states to enforce measures to combat global hunger or poverty. They are today's liminal pioneers, or more accurately, liminal profiteers. They are as brash and entitled as the nineteenth-century confidence men determined to sell their ideology to governments and their constituents 'at almost any price you've got the guts to ask.' They are here to save the world - as long as the world yields to their interests." (pp. 243-244)

"Against the egotism of Thiel, Bastillie, or the Gateses, individuals who eponymously stamp their mark on their endowments, the best donations are those that extend as far as possible the courtesy of indifference. By indifference I mean, quite literally, gifts offered with a LACK of self-involvement. Because if a gift is to be actually given - that is, if it's actually meant to be surrendered by a donor, preventing her or him from further claims on that gift - then a donor has no RIGHT to involvement. Recipients deserve their own independence. They don't deserve sympathy, which suggests a sort of false rapport with recipients, which crushes grantees under the taxing weight of a donor's good will. They don't deserve pity, which demeans as much as it empowers. If the real motivation is to avoid embroiling other in chains of enduring dependency or obligation, then true gifts should offer the respite of autonomy." (p. 245)

[Sagar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to finally reading this book, but was ultimately quite disappointed. While it does contain some valuable information and I also believe the underlying premise - that not all philanthropy is necessarily good or altruistic - is accurate, the book is riddled with false equivalences and sensationalist points. It also demonstrates a lack of understanding of how large organizations work and seems to place the blame for a number of the gates foundations missteps squarely at the feet of Bill and Melinda gates. I wish authors would take a more balanced and less polarized view in their books. Poor economics does a great job of providing a scientific analysis of policy initiatives, but this book sadly does not.

[MargaretDH · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. I think we should be taking a good look at what McGoey terms philanthrocapitalism, and I think she makes some good points. But ultimately, I think she comes to conclusions that the evidence doesn't support, and she's so eager to criticize that she misses the point.

Here's what I agreed with:

- philanthropy on the grand scale could do a lot better transparency. Because of Board of Directors (usually the people who ultimately make the funding decisions) confidentiality, people don't always know how or why grants are made.

- social enterprise business or social benefit businesses deserve a lot of scrutiny. We definitely should not take any business at their word that claims to be doing social good, and it can often be a smokescreen other parts of a not-so-ethical business.

- diverse boards are a good thing, and while I wouldn't go as far as McGoey does and mandate a two thirds non-family seat count, I would strongly encourage boards to consider opening their membership to non-family experts.

- the American tradition of using charitable dollars to fund deeply partisan think tanks that work to undermine the rights of the poor and advance the rights of the rich is pretty gross. Read Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right for a great take on this.

But here's where we diverge:

- McGoey argues that philanthrocapitalism, which she defines as large, private granting foundations whose founders (usually, but not always) drive the granting and strategy of the organization, is ipso facto a bad thing. And I just can't agree with this. Look, I definitely agree that not all grants made by those organizations are effective or perfect. But you know what? All of those people could have just bought another super-yacht. Or island. Or two more super-yachts, three private jets and four islands. A lot of those grants do good, and I think what McGoey is really criticizing is an economic and regulatory system that allows wealth accumulate among a small group of people. McGoey thinks the rich should not be afforded the tax shelter of setting up a foundation, and should just be forced to pay the tax. But, in my opinion, it's naive to think that the rich wouldn't find other tax loopholes or avoidance strategies.

- McGoey ascribes a lot of behavior to foundations that I would argue is not representative of the whole. Foundations are incredibly diverse, and there's a silly saying that once you've met one foundation, you've met one foundation. For example, she criticizes foundations for allowing people to sink a whole bunch of money into a foundation, and then disburse only 5% a year (the American regulatory minimum), suggesting that citizens are forgoing tax revenue for benefits they may never see. And while this is certainly true of a few foundations, many have existed for years, and disbursed more than the value of the original gift into their communities. Other foundations are flow through entirely, and allow people to give anonymously (McGoey does not state, but mistakenly implies that there are no large anonymous donors). And the Gates Foundation, the subject of this book, will spend all of it's money within 50 years of either Bill or Melinda Gates's death, whoever dies second.

- McGoey strongly criticizes the Gates for not investing more of their research dollars in developing nations, even quoting one doctor from an African country who won't apply anymore because he's already been rejected twice. Ok, look. Maybe the Gates Foundation should fund more research in the Global South and focus on developing human capital there. But maybe they have thoughtful reasons for choosing a different strategy? And maybe that guy who applied and was rejected twice wrote really bad applications. Or maybe he wrote good applications, and there were enough people that wrote great applications that he didn't make the cut. It just seemed a bit disingenuous to criticize their strategy when McGoey doesn't even think they should exist.

I guess I just think McGoey is missing the forest for the trees. Large scale philanthropy is not the problem, a system that directs wealth into the hands of the few is. And I just can't get on board with the idea that people like Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett pledging to give away half their wealth before they die is better than them buying more stuff or hiding the money in offshore accounts, even if you don't always agree with how and where they direct the funds. To use another cliche, it seems like McGoey is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

review to follow

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Current Affairs

How Bill Gates Makes the World Worse Off

McGoey came on the Current Affairs podcast with editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the career of Gates, the problems with billionaire charity, and the reasons philanthrocapitalists often escape serious criticism.

They also discuss Prof. McGoey’s work in the field of “ignorance studies.”

In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, McGoey studies the way institutions carefully exclude ideologically inconvenient information, creating a kind of useful ignorance. This interview has been edited and condensed for grammar and clarity.

When you published your book on the Gates Foundation, No Such Thing As a Free Gift, back in 2015, there wasn’t much criticism at all of the Gates Foundation. There was really a sense that they could do no wrong. Now, with some of Bill Gates’s actions surrounding vaccinations and COVID, and his very public divorce and personal scandals, some of the shine has come off the Gates Foundation.

It’s an interesting sociological question to try to understand how Bill Gates went from being a hero to a villain in such a short time span. In the general public, it was generally assumed that to give money away to any cause was a good thing. But for people who come from a socialist background, people who are anti-capitalist, there was concern about the idea that you could link the realms of philanthropy and capitalism in the manner that Mr. Gates was proposing to link them.

The idea that Gates was a defender of the rights and the entitlements of people who are most disenfranchised by circulations of global capital is simply a ludicrous proposition.

So when it came to the general public, my criticisms of Mr. Gates might have been surprising, but in some of the left-wing circles that I hung out in that I had been involved in for over a decade before I began to research the Gates Foundation more directly, my criticism was not that surprising.

It was a bit outlandish to assume that Mr. Gates, chief monopolist, was somehow going to be a defender of the rights of the poor, and someone who could close the global inequality gaps.

In reality, he was really at the forefront of helping to perpetuate inequality through his approach to labor contracts and through his approach to patent protections.

Ouch!

[Siera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I have read all year. I thought I knew a lot about philanthropy after working in and studying the aid industry for the past decade or more. This book tackles large philanthropy, specifically Gates, but she also mentions Rockefeller, Koch Brothers, Ted etc. I think this is a must read for anyone working in development in their own country or abroad and should be on related course syllabuses. Main message: Gates has done a lot of good, but can be ruthless in their business tactics, even in the realm of philanthropy. And philanthropy is an important way to pursue vested business interests. This book really speaks to the larger trends in development today with social entrepreneurship, private sector-led development advancing their interests, which was taboo in the past but now considered 'best' practice. I am left wondering how McGoey collected all these stories from the 'inside'. Really well done.

[Sander Philipse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linsey McGoey presents an important counter-narrative to the prevailing sanctification of billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates. McGoey shows that supposedly rational, innovative philanthro-capitalism is nothing new, drawing parallels between Gates and Gilded Age capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. In doing so, she highlights many ways in which both the past and modern-day philanthropists skew international aid, use their foundations to make a profit and evade taxes, and how their hubris and lack of attention to locality can do much more damage than good.

[Brandy Cross · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second read through of this

Overall opinion: I really like this book. Linsey is cogent, incredibly well-researched, funny, and likable.

This is a critique, not nearly so vitriolic as some of the other reviews would state, but rather dry, well-balanced, and quite-often adding in caveats to the positive for the critiqued parties. Not everything, of course, is so well balanced, but overall, it's a fair critique, with less bias than one would expect from a work of this nature.

Dislikes:
– Anti GMO-ism is so 2016. Can we move on already?
– An anthropologist McGoey is not. You could skip the whole history of the gift section and be better off

That's it, which should probably say enough, considering the lengthy rants I'm prone to if you ready my other reviews.

This book pairs excellently with A Brief History of Neoliberalism

[Vishal Misra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent and timely book. McGoey brings the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation under critical scrutiny with this study, and it is about bloody time. It is hard to go days without hearing of some mega donation from yet another tech billionaire. The media fawns over the generous heart of these benefactors, and the recipients are rightly pitied or lambasted as ungrateful and irresponsible. But are these billionaires worth the sycophantic column inches they garner?

McGoey is even handed. She points out that Bill and Melinda Gates are not monsters, and have no doubt done some good. But they are also people with a messiah complex. Whilst at Microsoft, Gates lobbied for extensive intellectual property protection, and enforcement of the TRIPS agreement of the WTO. This hamstrings access to medicine in the third world, which Gates and his crew of motley philanthropists go to solve. Indeed, they are wedded to upholding the system that they purport to cure with their "generosity". McGoey points out that their motives are no different to Andrew Carnegie (the strike busting and wage reducing magnate of education fame) and Rockefeller.

There is much to be said about how such donations can be seen cynically as a tax cutting ploy. But it is reflective of the current situation in which a few private individuals provide public services. Their intervention in education have led to standardised testing and rampant teacher cheating. There is no evidence that their methods are effective (or more effective than state actions) and ultimately they do nothing at all to empower local NGOs and healthcare workers in recipient countries. It seems that philanthropists want tax breaks, to keep the third world beholden to western markets and to increase market share for companies that these foundations hold shares in (Gates, a pioneer of public health keeps shares in Coca Cola with no sense of irony). The cognitive dissonance in the private aid market is stunning, and this book goes a long way to revealing this.

[Alexandria Avona · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The contradiction inherent in slavery, that the humanity of the slave must necessarily be simultaneously denied and affirmed, recurs in a variety of dramatic and less dramatic guises in modern patriarchy. Contract demands that their womanhood be both denied and affirmed."

This book has showed me someone I didn't know much about and thought was just some white knighting computer guy has a real, underestimated streak of hostility and maleficence.

I only didn't give this four stars instead of five because there are clear parts where key details that could have really helped are left out and it's obvious. I can't respect that.

As I read this book, I was constantly reminded of this quote by Carole Pateman. Surrounding Bill Gates' Medina acres is a 34% pass rate for mathematics, a series of issues where women were completely stripped of justice at Microsoft (Pateman notes that the slave is always denoted with their powerlessness publically to mark the as such to prevent their escape), and some of the worst labor conditions I have ever seen in the United States (I have been exposed to 5 EEOC cases, 2 CJC cases, 2 DOH cases, and two LNI cases in the period of two years, as well as a failing attorney general--it bears all the marks of someone who wants to mark individuals with powerlessness). There are several cases where moving from stocks that relied heavily on unsustainable energy were allowed to persist if Bill Gates' foundation capitalized on it, stating that the economy was at stake. Here, the workers are not free from exploitability, including labor history such as attempting to use right-wing paramilitary to murder union strikers covertly. This is bridging on standards of slavery that even slave-apologists in the civil war wouldn't have touched--many denied they had the right to kill their slaves, in such a "genteel" act of "humanity" for the dearly "humane" slaveowning class.

What I begin to see is this slave-owner mentality. The use of NCLB to slash funds and then slash them again instead of support where failure means the LACK of energy not the NEED for punishment, is equivalent to a whip. It even ended in a suicide notable for a brown person, as is mentioned in this book. The "whipping" punitivity of NCLB and the "don't need em" rhetoric of the charter school when the public system fails to do the bidding of a self-elected emperor who can't even improve his own backyard (34% math fail rate is not acceptable) shows serious, serious issues with this man and his foundation.

In addition, his obsession with polio seems to have deep ties to the CIA as noted in this book. And even I heard loud and clear the lack of names and specifics that had to be let out by Linsey McGoey. That he picks black and brown countries to target for his vaccines that have NOTORIOUSLY led to vaccine-caused mutations due to over-vaccination speaks to underlying untreated mental issues for the vaccines. And that he then doesn't factor in the actual scientific evidence of the global south shows that he doesn't view the global south as the "real owners" of their bodies, akin to how slaveowners didn't see anything wrong with raping, sexualizing, or exploiting the bodies of their slaves as they didn't see any "real owner" they were dealing with. The multiple vaccines speaks to this issue latent.

In addition, changing obsessions, weird issues such as using Clinton to secure his Porsche needs, and using Foundation funds as lubricant for slimy deals that other people carried out from a position of plausible deniability is really painting a different picture of this man.

I was especially disturbed by the answer to my question as to why Bill Gates was buying up so much farmland. Linsey clearly shows that is to now continue his wealth for the ages in terms of his food patents. We already know he weaponizes his patents in Russia to silence NGOs very much aligned and sometimes directly working with the Kremlin in a widely published scientific paper on the matter. Now we can see how he is applying the spoils of patent capitalism to every potential sphere he can think of, including the most basic, food.

When we see Paypal CEOs also working at Palantir, we can also see that other things might be getting patented. Things to do with right-wing paramilitaries that kill Union strikers. Things to do with companies similar to Palantir. Whole methods of abusing the court system to silence unions and continue to violently violate the very people that provide this man with any money. Perhaps even "patents" of the court system itself, such as willful negligence by in-the-pocket Attorney Generals that only do their jobs at certain prices, and then only in exactly the way told, showing their will is not their own but that of a slave's just like everyone else's in this area.

And when we begin to see the scores surrounded by all this money, only a fool wouldn't begin to see..someone can do something, and they don't. Someone likes it that way. Someone who obsessively penetrates the bodies of those most vulnerable to the point their bodies can't expel the virus anymore due to mutations that kill little Indian children. Eight Indian girls dead due to over-vaccination because they didn't take these trials seriously. Because they didn't view them as fully human.

When you start putting it together, this book is horrifying. The patent-frenzy that Bill Gates stumbled upon and which gave him any fortune at all is the very link that could dethrone him. And he himself is the one revealing that when people can act like he does, we don't live in a state of social contract where justice is preserved with excellence to all who seek it. Social contract is a very fragile state that any massive social contract violation could bring crashing down, and any "real exchange" of patenting with it. In fact, the patent itself could be utterly destroyed by aggressive, malicious overuse by the right person.

You see Gates, if justice itself can be patented, we live in a state of nature. Where patents don't apply. And where the coffers of the entire self-elected empire are voided. Where injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere is violently violated, multiple times, making a piggish mockery of the quote to the point it's hard to remember it amidst the covert institutional violence of this greedy programmer on all sides. Until, suddenly, the perpetrator looks up and realizes that they just destroyed the very ephemeral superstate that was social contract by their greed to patent anything in sight. Including justice itself.

Ironically, such a state of nature is the very last place I think Bill Gates would survive.

Typical corporate welfarist through the Foundation model.

He is clearly out of control in his aggression, unable to stop his cycles of retaliation with a benevolent facade. His NCLB policies proved that to us.

This is clearly deep down a very angry man with some serious repressed issues.

Truly horrifying.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A polemic, certainly, but not an unwarranted one. When TED Talks won't broadcast something of this sort (p 108) in an election year (2012) because it's 'too political' and 'a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted' (p 109), then it becomes ever more important to have volumes such as these to consider as we individually confront disparities in wealth and the dichotomies and dilemmas they present.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Some elements of it were really good indeed and there was some thought provoking content, and content that should make you angry at how the world is designed. And yet, my overwhelming feeling is that I am not sure what book I was reading. It was neither an expose on the Gates family, nor an analysis of wealthy foundations, rather it was a bit of this, a bit of that and as a consequence I felt a little underwhelmed by the end.

The book claims it is about philanthro-capitalism with a focus on the Gates Foundation to illustrate it's arguments but at times it feels like there is an odd chapter thrown in about Bill Gates well documented sharp / unethical business practices which kind of feel they should be in a different book. At times it reads like a hit piece on Bill Gates as if to say, 'he has rehabilitated his reputation with his philanthropy but look at what kind of a person he is'. Don't get me wrong, I don't buy his Damascene conversion particularly, nor do I see the need to defend him but I think some of the criticisms deflect somewhat from the book.

The book starts with a chapter on the Carnegie family (those of 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' fame) who instigated a great programme of works in the US, particularly in libraries. Who famously turned guns on striking workers too. There is then a brief section on the Rockefellers and then we jump to the present day. I guess I would have found the book more interesting if there were more history of philanthro-capitalism rather than 'here's an early 20th century example and here is Bill Gates'.

And yet there is a lot to criticise Bill Gates for - how his foundation is such a major funder to the World Health Organisation, unelected donors are having an undemocratic influence over global health policy. How his foundation invests in companies which cause harm (i.e. Coca Cola) whilst trying to promote healthy lives worldwide. There is a critique of the paternalistic figure of Carnegie / Gates and the sense that whatever wrongs they do to people they do it for their own good, and also a sense that, 'it's my money, I'll decide what happens'.

Fundamentally the book doesn't go into enough depth here, but when it does it is incisive. The question I am asking is, 'to what extent are the billions held in Foundations the 'property' of the trustees to give?' All this wealth has been raised through exploitation and extraction of the people. There is a sense that this is not Bill Gates's money to give away and neither should he have a say.

I particularly liked the explanation of the tax breaks for charitable giving in the US. How roughly 75% of charitable giving would have been paid in tax, and it is this tax that should be in the public purse. Globally so many of these mega-rich have failed to pay their fair share of tax and they are effectively saying, 'I decide what my taxes are spent on' - which is not a luxury the rest of the populace have.

Something which comes through quite strong, although I would have liked the author to put more of a focus on, is not that Gates and his ilk are 'evil', but more the way they run their foundations are rooted in their mental models of how the world works.

So in what world will Gates and Buffett ever divest from Coca-Cola? And if they want seeds for the Global South, instead of asking farmers what works, why wouldn't they link in with Monsanto and create a market for GM crops, using the Global South as the breadbasket for the West? And if they want to get into education, why wouldn't they use the flawed performance metrics of business and standardised testing and ignoring the complexity in education. They can't! Bill Gates is first and foremost of the capitalist executive class - thinking rooted in shareholder value and maximising performance. He doesn't understand pedagogy, any more than he understands biology. He may think he does. He may be advised by others. Like a lot of people in charge of stuff he thinks he knows more than he does.

The point I was getting was the rich leadership class expect that they should run the world, but their dominant thinking is what has harmed the world.

It's inarguable that charitable donations and philanthropy have made some things better for many people around the world. The argument that isn't pursued, and what I think is McGoey's point is that this scale of philanthropy shouldn't exist. For in order for it to exist harm must have been caused elsewhere in the creation of these excessively wealthy funds.

As I was reading this book I walked through the city in which I live. The dominant building in the city is being refurbished by the council. It's a library and museum publicly funded, and it is a magnificent building. It was provided in part by a wealthy mill owner who bequeathed a large sum to the city so that the working class could experience books and culture. I can look upon that building and be thankful for the gift that has stood for over a century, but can also recognise that every penny of that donation was paid for by the mill workers.

Philanthropy is a complex issue. This book isn't the final word on the issue but does contribute to the conversation. Despite some of it's flaws I enjoyed reading it.

[Kasey Dietrich · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a whole lot of coded language in here. I noticed a few things about how this book is written. It tries to trigger and emotional response towards hating the fact that there are rich Africans in Africa. The book also paints philanthropists from days past as well as other topics as black and white without providing much context or evidence. It remains incredibly confused as to who it's audience is since it is trying to dish out the dirt on the Melinda Gates foundation while making as many excuses for them as possible and using rumors and glamorous celebrity "stories" that's stories, NOT TESTIMONY OR QUOTES ON RECORD. This is incredibly similar to what people do to distract the public from the corruption in their companies and non-profits.

Also it's trying to insinuate that not only does the world have a duty to interfere with Africa's politics which will likely have lasting affects on their culture, but the book also seems to insinuate that Africa and it's people are incapable of improving their issues ever without constant coddling by western society. This is pretty gross, and seems to be a problem if the book is pointing out how philanthropy just makes rich Africans and Western peoples richer rather than helping the needy. Also it first mentions, before any of the controversies around the Gates name, that he "Gets shit done" according to rappers and hip hop artists. If the rumors are true, he may be getting too much done, including sterilizing African people "accidentally" with some of his "vaccines".

Also why is this focused just on Gates? It just seems like a way to give him great PR, like this book is an ad. Real scummy. There's a long history of companies and non profits "helping" the African people by killing them. I will give you one example. Nestle was selling baby formula that was mostly sugar and dressing up salespeople in labcoats and nurse uniforms to advise African women to stop breastfeeding and instead buy lots of their formula. I will link a source below so you can go down the rabbit hole yourself if you'd like. They also never advised going to a doctor to see what best for them or their children. This of course led to several babies being mal-nutritioned leading to illness and death. Death. Of. Babies. In. Africa. Let that sink in. So these African people have a been through a lot of trough a lot of death and grief as westerners and others are convinced that they can "help them" and think they know best.

This book also takes an emotional rather than logical look at this. It already has it's assumptions that it's willing to sneak in without being clear or honest about their views. When mentioning philanthropy in general, it mentions apparent "progress" and doesn't mention great example in stats, but instead with anecdotal evidence. There was a stat mentioned once about the decrease in polio cases, BUT my problem with this is that despite it being in a paragraph about Gates, the fact is unrelated unless you can prove to me that without any other organizations help, the Gates foundation made that decrease happen. Which is incredibly hard to prove. So why was it there? My guess is that the author wanted Bill Gates to be associated with "progress" and positive outcomes without actually causing those directly or citing evidence anywhere. The progress and using terms like "modern philanthropy" are used as a way to make those who are not in favor of what non-profits and their figureheads are doing, or simply ask questions and will not be blind sheep to whatever cause as simply "behind the times".

It uses interesting language when the book describes people with questions about what philanthropists are actually doing and where donations actually go. Again, the book is obsessed with kissing the boots of the Gates family, so it only mentions the Gates foundation as VAGUELY as possible when refuting arguments or just refuting questions. It calls people who have any questions or who do not blindly follow the foundation as "CRITICS" of modern philanthropy. This is not a derogatory term, obviously, but in this particular context, the message comes loud and clear, that people who ask where their money is going are critics, and that it isn't normal or due diligence to ask such questions about your money and what you support.

Heres the link to an article on Nestle "helping" Africans and ending up killing them
https://www.businessinsider.com/perso...

I am so disappointed since this subject has so much dirt on it and yet it was handled by seemingly a boot-kisser. I will find the truth whether this author likes that or not.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book was much more and much better than I expected. I think I bought it after an online debate where I asserted that any foundation with a name on it was tainted by egotism and that the way to give money away is to either give it directly to people in need, or give it to charitable organizations doing work on the ground, not to set up your own foundation and then go around trying to make the world the way you want it to be. this was published in 2015 and I probably bought it not too long after that, then never read it.

I thought this was going to be an exploration of the gates foundation's shady side - and it was - but it was much more than that, it is a takedown of corporate philanthropy going back to the carnegies and the rockefellers. she discusses andrew carnegie, who was a union buster (using violent and murderous strike-breaking tactics) who then turned to philanthropy to improve his image. it wasn't just that he treated his workers poorly while helping other people - carnegie literally believed he should keep his workers' wages low so that he had more money to spend on charitable causes. every once in a while, it's good to read a book that reminds you that the superrich see the rest of us like livestock, that corporations are sociopathic, and that the ongoing war between the rich and the poor is a long and bitter one.

mcgoey is thorough and incisive, with a dry tone. she discusses how the gates foundation and other megafoundations can do more harm than good - conflicts of interest with the companies they are invested in, promoting policies that create markets for their own products or the products of companies they are invested in, misguided policies - i.e. focusing on eradicating polio, which infects 225 people per year, at the direct expense of fighting diseases like measles, which kills 150,000 people per year. it's hard to imagine bill gates' ego isn't thinking, I could be the guy who eradicated polio. mcgoey questions whether given the self-interested spending, spending priorities created by a very few people who don't have to answer to governments or anyone else really, it wouldn't be better for gates, instead of making charitable gifts, to just keep that money and pay taxes on it.

in the conclusion of the book, mcgoey harkens back to my initial point: "against the egotism of thiel, balsillie, or the gateses, individuals who eponymously stamp their mark on their endowments, the best donations are those that extend as far as possible the courtesy of indifference. by indifference I mean, quite literally, gifts offered with a lack of self-involvement. because if a gift is to be actually given - that is, if it's actually meant to be surrendered by a donor, preventing him or her from further claims on that gift - then a donor has no right to involvement."

so, I feel vindicated. I think in that initial online discussion or argument I was seen as someone truly cynical who couldn't appreciate that at least these billionaires were giving vast sums of money away to make the world a better place. it's not the way you or I give money, though, is it? you give to a cause that moves you, and that cause, doing that work, decides how they will spend the money. of course it behooves us to do our due diligence, make sure the money is going to the work we want to support and not to excessive overhead, etc. there's nothing stopping bill gates from doing the same thing. instead of setting up a foundation that is also an investor, he could just identify groups doing work he agrees with and fund them, no strings attached.

anyway, the whole book is filled with eye opening examples about the nature of corporate (and government - you might be surprised how much of the US's food aid to other country is tied to US vendors and dissipated in things like transportation by US carriers) aid and related legislation that benefits the ultra-wealthy rather than the most disadvantaged. it's nearly 10 years old but still very worth reading.  

[John Leven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full Disclosure: I’m a huge fan of Gates and Buffett and read this book (which criticizes them both heavily) to try and keep a well-rounded, balanced view of these two role models of mine.

The main argument of this book is that big philanthropies, especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are basically untaxed and unregulated, and that that is bad for society. This is a pretty ballsy argument because Gates and his Foundation are highly revered and often cited as examples of the “way capitalism should be.” I truly admire the author's contrarianism here.

The author, McGoey, fairly convincingly suggests that, while big businesses are accountable to shareholders and regulations and politicians are accountable to voters, big foundations are accountable to virtually no one. With little to no accountability, the author asserts that billionaires with “god-complexes” take it upon themselves to try and fix the world’s problems (poorly), influence global policy making towards their own self-interest rather than the “greater good”, and actually risk replacing government run redistribution programs in some parts of the world. The net result suggested is that many well-intentioned billionaires do more harm than good with their mega foundations.

This book clearly has a strong left-wing bias, generally assuming multinational corporations and self-interested billionaires are dangerous, and that large government run redistribution programs are much better able to solve most of the world’s problems. [For the record, I consider myself a left-leaning Independent, but this book tends to be much further left than I generally am.]

Specifically, the solutions that McGoey suggests are: 1) the elimination of tax breaks for foundations, 2) capping the size of mega-foundations, and 3) forcing foundation Boards to have “independent/outside directors. These policies are suggested with the goal to cause billionaires like Gates to have less money to redistribute and less influence on where/how it gets redistributed, and instead for society (aka the government) to redistribute more of Gate’s money.

The last title is called “The Selfish Gift” which just seems a little too harsh of a characterization of the largest charitable gift in human history. Also, there is virtually no consideration to the basic individualist notion that “It’s Gate’s money, he should be able to donate it however he sees fit!”

At the end of the day, what the author really believes is that socialism is superior to charity in solving the world’s problems. She believes that higher taxes on the wealthy and more government redistribution works better than lower taxes and rich billionaires individually redistributing their wealth. (Which she’d see as inherently undemocratic)

While I don’t agree with everything in this book, I really do appreciate the fair criticisms of Gates and Buffett (two of my heroes) and feel that I have a much more well-rounded view of those two gentleman, and of big philanthropy in general.

[Una · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am sorry, but I can’t take seriously any book that includes “GMO” and “cancer in rats” in the same sentence. Some of the false or one-sided claims included in the book:

- The infamous Séralini study (cancer in rats) was trashed by the scientific community for a number of reasons, including small sample size, poor choice of animals, flawed statistical analysis, lack of experiment data and access to supporting data and improper pathological analysis.

- The Séralini study was obviously cherry-picked from a pittance of (flawed) studies. At the same time, the author does not mention a mountain of evidence suggesting there isn’t anything inherently unsafe about GMO, including a consensus between major medical and scientific organizations on this topic.

- For the specific MON810 crop from the Séralini study, the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) concluded in its GMO90+ project in 2018 that “no harmful effects of the MON810 and NK603 maize diets on the health and metabolism of the rodents were detected, even after a lengthy exposure period”.

- The Indian farmer suicide myth has been refuted before this book was published. Cotton production in India is a much more complex topic with many issues, including the scope of initial GM evaluation, risky business decisions, lack of irrigation, lack of government subsidies and lending support. Even 20 years after the introduction of GMO Bt cotton in India, the subject remains controversial, with conflicting evidence regarding alternative methods and true profitability of Bt cotton.

- Inability to reuse the seeds isn’t a GMO-specific issue when you consider that hybrid seeds can’t be replanted as well.


Considering that this book was written not that long ago and all of the points above are easily verified by anyone with an internet connection, it feels like bad investigative journalism disguised as non-biased comments.

In reality, the author allowed for her ideological standpoint to completely control the narrative of the book, which is too often one-sided. That’s a pity because she does raise several valid points which get lost in all the fact-checking efforts.

Sources: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

[Jose Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because of this book I learned of a vehicle Bill Gates may possibly have in his garage. A Porsche 1988 Coupe 989. Sexy car that one is.

All jokes aside i'm just a simple man reading this book, unlike other reviewers who apparently work/worked in a social field, or even worked directly with a Bill Gates organization.


In my humble opinion this book is a "Good Read".Linsey speaks upon the social behaviors of the extremely wealthy of this modern age. The historical examples and fact full quotes from gentleman such as Carniege and Rockefeller are very welcoming. As a reader one can analyze and brainstorm upon the attitudes of those business magnets. Also one may see where our modern philanthropists might have received their influence, whether indirectly by reading their works or directly from close/family friends of the earlier philanthropists.
Quoted from the book (a statement that I believe carries a message that is attempted to be delivered to its readers throughout the book)
"Carniege thought that the chief duty of a philanthropist was to build ladders enabling the less well-of to climb up, while at all times exercising caution over which sort of people should be helped."
"If anything, the exclusivity of the events is their strongest appeal. 'We don't have castles and noble titles, so how else do you indicate that you're part of the elite?' Andrew Zolli, the executive director of Poptech, an annual ideas fest in Camden, Maine, commented to New York magazine."

Gateses are staunch supporters to patents. Their aid money are distributed into areas where they may plant seeds for a future market."Lubricating future sales" as stated by historian Theodore Roszak. The aid is not necessarily for the best of the locals healthcare as they may state. They are intellectuals that have the power and support from the media that will glamorize all of their philanthropic actions as humanitarian.

This book is a gold mine. Do your self a favor and get it.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear and mostly well thought out criticism of philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism, the latter being the novel way of doing philanthropy that emulates the way business is done in the profit-driven capitalist world, as well as the argument that capitalism itself is "naturally philanthropic" in driving innovation that benefits everyone through new products, higher quality and lower prices, with a particular focus on the Gates Foundation

Found the history examining Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie very interesting, particularly the latter whose philanthropy was driven by a fear of socialism and paternalistic belief that he could improve communities better than they could or would have done for itself

The book also does well in drawing on broader evidence and literature to support their criticism such as the power and leverage large philanthropies have over smaller organisations regardless of results

Other highlights include:
Calling attention to the absence of a clear statistical link between microfinance and poverty alleviation
and that investors, most of whom are based in wealthy countries, are the prominent group to have profited from microfinance

Demonstrating how most "market-based" initiatives in international development are not actually market-based at all, rather than being initiated or sustained by open market investment, they are nurtured and bulwarked by large injections of state and philanthropic funding
This was demonstrated by well by the example of Vodafone establishing M-PESA in KENYA with the support of DFID grants, which resulted in M-PESA's success and large profits for Vodafone that were sustained by their tax avoidance; a further slap in the face to public finances was the Gates Foundation offering further grants to Vodafone's subsidiary, which resulted in their own tax break

A further irony is the cognitive dissonance inherent in social entrepreneurship namely the continued insistence that new entrepreneurial movements are playing a revolutionary role in global poverty reduction despite the lack of clear evidence

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

McGoey has produced most disorganized work of nonfiction I have read in my life: the first 100 pages are extremely skippable, although the next couple sections provide some interesting anecdotes on Gates's education and v****** enterprises (good thing the book came out in 2015).

The biggest issues stem from McGoey's lack of focus. By the end, I still didn't know whether she thought foundations were good or bad on net, nor did I understand what she wanted to do about them. The good and interesting writing here (roughly 50 pages of it) would have served much better as an a portion of an unauthorized biography of Mr. Gates and his empire than as one of many editorial turns throughout this narrative. Hopefully such an unauthorized biography exists or will exist someday: Mr. Gates presents a fascinating figure as even the lean anecdotes in this book demonstrate.

The author also engages in the extremely annoying and obviously unconvincing habit of quoting unambiguously self-interested people on a variety of subjects without any context. These asides follow the formula of "the Gates Foundation does X, but person who obviously benefits from Not-X does not like it." Many of these quotes do not even justify the positions beyond "we know what Gates is doing doesn't work/is bad." Although I do not realistically expect an anthropologist to analyze the effectiveness of an institution's disbursements, this sort of uncritical reporting feels lazy and predictable.

[Charles Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charity is an excuse for bad governance- Preacher Phil

Robert Fressel, 1911. “I can conceive of no greater mistake most disastrous to the end of religion if not society than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice.”

On an average, foundations donate only 5.5% of their endowment.

The Gates have championed private charter schools which leave the neediest students behind. And, he advocates for the dubious No Child Left Behind debacle. Contributions have also been made for computer schools and the sale of Surfaces from which Microsoft has profited.

Monsanto and Coca Cola are favorite investments of Gates... and Buffet. Coke is sold in emerging markets of Africa and Mexico where massive consumption is causing serious health problems.

In short, foundation investment policies are often harmful, while at the same time providing large donors and corporation a huge tax advantage.

[Kerem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe more of a 3.5 stars, and I wished from the start it were higher.

The book is certainly very well researched and coherently written. Starting with a bit of the history of super rich's philanthropy (and its relation to their businesses) and delving into the major areas of particularly Gates' philanthropy (but not sparing others either) from global health and education to food security, the book gives a detailed view with plenty food for thought. Essentially the book boils down to the fact that nobody should be that rich and control everything.

Some anecdotal bits, some random fact throwing in between building up her case and not always the best causal argumentation are probably the weaker sides of the book, plus since its publication 6 years ago and especially since the start of the covid pandemic, there's certainly much more material for a extended version of this book. All in all a book worth reading!

[Donnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I read it. I haven't really thought much about whether there was anything besides generosity behind large donations by wealthy people. I suspected that some wealthy people in business or other fields were getting something from it, but I was still grateful the library or school or town...benefited many people and was done to help make things better. I'm not sure the examples given in the book prove that donations always have some other agenda, but it does show that, in some cases, people who donate large sums like to have some control over how that money is spent. That seems reasonable, on the surface, although well-thought out plans by the recipient that are replaced by a different proposal from the donor that won't deal with the problem at hand may not be nearly as useful. The book could be more concise, but it does raise some questions and suggests that sometimes "looking a gift horse in the mouth" might be useful.

[Aris Setyawan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably, it is the most common question in the art world. Once, every artist must face this inevitable question: how do we get money to finance our works? No matter what the field: whether fine art, performing art, or any other art branch, financial issue is the problem. Making art sometimes could be really expensive in the term of material, human resource, or any other technical things.

Mostly, to finance their works, artist has three financial option: finance their works by their own money, ask some help from government, or submit proposal to philanthropy institution. Among three option, each has its problem. First, to finance their works by their own money is not as easy as what it looks like coz mostly artist doesn’t have much money. Secondly, although government functions have a budget for art or culture works, the bureucracy sometime could be really annoying. The artist who send their good art project proposal could be wait for almost six month to one year—or sometimes longer—to received the answer from governmental institution: whether government would finance their works or not.

The latter is something we should put an attention on it. When artist cannot finance their works by their little money, or they’ve depressed by governmental bureucracy, they will ask help from philanthropy. As if philanthropy is the saviour of art world. Therefore, the question is emerging: imagine art without philantrophy or donor? Is that gonna work?

Philanthropy is such an act of give giving. As Anthropologist Linsey McGoey pointed out in her book No Such Thing As a Free Gift. Furthermore, French philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out, the word “gifts” can be seen as a type of pharmakon: a Greek term with multiple meanings, including remedy, poison, talisman, and intoxicant. Gifts are a double-edged offering. Recipients typically feel beholden to reciprocate the gift, while decorous silence over exactly how or when repayment should take place can make the gift more burdensome than a strictly economic exchange with clearly delineated stipulations for repayment, interest, and so on.

- By that definition of philanthropy we must suspice what the motive of philanthropy? The injustice economic of capitalism, and so, philanthropy is the instrument to makes everything seems alright.
- McGoey pointed out that the biggest cake pieces from American philanthropy goes to white and privileged art institution.
- Indonesian probably has similar issue: philanthropy goes to privileged and settled art institution.
- The dependency of an artist could be a problem: what if art works without philanthropy?
- in some case, some artist or organization works without any help from philanthropy, they could survive, create their own art pieces without any subside.

[Shirin Attia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is possible to 'do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal'.

Philanthrocapitalism, as the authors coins it, has become the growing trend adopted by the rich to preserve, rather than redistribute their wealth; it serves their business, political, social and legal agendas, a powerful concept that conceals their inexperience and failures in ventures they initiate in the developing nations, be it in the educational, health, or agricultural sectors etc..
The more the organization fails to reach its own stated goals, the more opportunities it has to try and mitigate its own past weaknesses.

"Quite ironically, the answer to ineffective philanthropy is more of it; the failure of philanthropy is its own success".

[Nadir Belmokhtar · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a whole 6 months to finish this book.
Not because it's too boring or too dry, i would say it's because of my lack of exposure to such books, detailing the history of each idea, each event, that would serve the purpose of the book; that current philanthropy is more than that.
It opened my eyes to a world that i was not really taking notice of. How we are manipulated to think that anything that is presented as good is good.
Bill gates, one of the people i say i respect not iodize is present here as not so respectable individual, careless about the consequences of his actions that he deems necessary and the "right ones".
Very important read for anyone who thinks today's rich are the savior because they say so.