(p. A15) Paul David Hewson said it best during a 2012 speech at Georgetown University. Wait, who? “Aid is just a stopgap,” said Mr. Hewson, whose stage name is Bono. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” We still haven’t found what he’s looking for. An economic powerhouse would be able to afford mosquito nets and malaria drugs without handouts. That should be the endgame.
. . .
At its best, lots of philanthropy is very useful, but may not be sustainable over time—a sugar high that rarely enables that “teach a man how to fish” thing. Effective altruism may be an oxymoron. And it’s hard to miss that much of philanthropy is to fix government failures in education, welfare or medicine. I think that was Bono’s point.
But at its shadiest, philanthropy drives the misallocation of capital, overvaluing professors, the U.N. and climate poets and undervaluing those who can productively increase societal wealth to fund solutions to the future’s harder problems.
If only there were a way to use capital to provide opportunity, train workers, pay middle-class wages, help people build wealth . . . wait, it just came to me. How about starting new companies and investing in entrepreneurs and world-changing technology?
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to last quoted paragraph, in original; bracketed word in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 16, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)