Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
I have good news for everyone concerned about wealth inequality: billionaires are very generous.
Just this month, a tech founder pledged $100 million to fight climate change. A hedge fund manager donated $50 million to build a new wing at a prestigious university. A retail mogul gave $25 million to fund scholarships for underprivileged students.
Inspiring, isn’t it?
Now let me tell you what they’re not telling you.
Here’s how billionaire philanthropy works:
I have been collecting words. Not because I enjoy philology (though I do), but because the words a society uses for its poor reveal more about the society than about the poor.
Consider the vocabulary:
“Underprivileged.” Literally: lacking privilege. The word locates the problem in the person’s absence of something, as if privilege were a natural condition and its lack were an anomaly. It does not name the system that distributes privilege unequally. It names the person who did not receive enough of it.
Here is a pair of facts that should be placed next to each other more often than they are.
Fact one: approximately one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. In wealthy countries, the majority of this waste occurs at the retail and consumer level – food that was perfectly edible, thrown away because it was not purchased in time, or because it did not meet cosmetic standards, or because the household that bought it did not eat it before it expired.
I have been asked – repeatedly, across centuries, in various formulations – to explain the difference between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”
I have a counter-question: what is the difference between the “deserving rich” and the “undeserving rich”?
This question is never asked, which tells you everything you need to know about who designed the categories.
The concept of the “deserving poor” is one of history’s most effective tools of social control. It works by dividing the poor into two groups: those who are poor through no fault of their own (the ill, the elderly, the widowed) and those who are poor because of some personal failing (laziness, immorality, bad choices).
There is a distance – measurable, observable, and damning – between the place where poverty is discussed and the place where poverty is lived.
At the podium, poverty is a policy challenge. It is a line item, a percentage, a target for reduction. It is discussed in terms of programs and metrics and five-year plans. The language is clean. The rooms are air-conditioned. The speakers are well-fed.
On the ground, poverty is a mother choosing which of her children eats today. It is a clinic with one doctor for four thousand people. It is a school where thirty students share ten textbooks, half of which are outdated. It is not a policy challenge. It is a daily negotiation with survival.