Giving and the Poverty Machine

Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

Peter Buffett, a composer and the son of Warren Buffett, had an opinion piece in the Times this weekend examining the rise of the nonprofit sector and the way we “give back.” Peter often hears people say, “if only they had what we have” — what we have being clean water, free markets, and access to education and the internet — but what we also have is, well, poverty and inequality. How can we eradicate poverty in other countries if we haven’t figured out a system to eradicate it where we live?

Photo: Ethan Bloch

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