Wishing to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates and , Jeff Bezos turned to the internet for advice on philanthropy. It鈥檚 not a frivolous task, and Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is on track to become the world鈥檚 richest person, is right to seek guidance far and wide. Philanthropy is tricky.
It is more difficult than entrepreneurship because philanthropy lacks the concrete metrics of profit and loss. Philanthropists have both the luxury and the burden of thinking big.
Philanthropy most often succeeds when it supports existing healthy structures. The investments of the likes of Gates and Ed Scott (dubbed Silicon Valley鈥檚 鈥渕ost effective global giver鈥�) in fighting AIDS, polio, malaria and tuberculosis have made a substantial difference. This is not just because they took the lead on these issues, but also because structures like the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control are already effective and able to allocate an influx of resources well.
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When structures are dysfunctional, as is often the case with education or economic development, results are less certain. Much of went to waste because money alone could not mitigate the rot of local and state governance, lack of expertise, and a and .
Attempts to ease urban deprivation can produce measly returns. Evidence of this came at a conference I attended this year on the New Urban Agenda, a UN effort to guide urban development. There, the nonprofit arm of a multibillion dollar corporation gave a presentation that touted singularly unimpressive philanthropic achievements, such as building a municipal web portal that attracted a mere 200,000 hits in two years.
Crumbling cities
Bezos has spoken of 鈥渉elping people in the here and now鈥� at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact鈥�. This means tackling two difficult problems 鈥� education and crumbling urban infrastructure 鈥� in addition to health and emergency relief.
So how can he try to avoid the pitfalls? Bezos鈥檚 philanthropy will be most powerful if it plays to his and Amazon鈥檚 existing strengths, beginning in the US.
Above all, Amazon knows how to get stuff to people. It has enhanced, supplemented and sometimes replaced existing public and private shipping infrastructure with its own, as well as experimenting with new forms of delivery. The company鈥檚 imminent move into bricks-and-mortar stores with its purchase of Whole Foods will also give it a significant physical footprint within communities, which will presumably explode in the years to come.
If Bezos can combine Amazon鈥檚 unparalleled shipping infrastructure with community-based efforts to distribute knowledge (in the form of skills training, apprenticeships, and job matching) and resources (such as community centres and other physical infrastructure investment), Bezos may actually be well placed to ease the economic deprivation that creates apathy and despair in his own nation.
There are those who displeased with the new wave of Silicon Valley philanthropy see it as an inadequate substitute for traditional government and NGOs. This may well be true, but given the ongoing sclerosis of the US government and the uneasy populist movements wracking Europe, it would be foolhardy to reject such philanthropy out of hand. Rather, we should encourage it even as we police it.
David Auerbach is a technology writer based in New York and a fellow at the New America Foundation
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