Well, I won’t fight you, but I’d suggest reading the essay in it’s entirety if you’re not sure of the meaning.
To clarify, by truly wealthy, I mean the Davos set, as in, the few thousand or so with hundreds of millions or more. By the The Economist’s measure, 98 billionaires possess more wealth than the bottom half of the global population. The share of wealth held by the truly rich then necessitates the rest having much less to split among themselves. Or to put it another way, the Davos set, possessed of far more than they could ever need, or their children need, or their children’s children need, mandate by that possession alone billions having much less than they need. No amount of philanthropy well-intentioned or otherwise, could overcome this basic arithmetic. Do foundations cure poverty and food insecurity in the poorest parts of the world? The short answer is no.
The Cleveland Foundation, long one of the U.S.'s larger charitable ventures, has been lauded for things such as keeping the lights on for the Cleveland Orchestra- which can certainly be counted as one of our greatest cultural products. Courtesy of the foundation’s largesse, many children who would not otherwise are given the chance to experience the Orchestra. On it’s face, of course this is a good thing.
But this experience doesn’t exist in a vacuum- many of those children will return home from their visit to the orchestra wondering if there will be anything to eat when they get there. Wondering if the power will still be on. The next day, they will return to their schools, overstuffed, understaffed, without enough books to go around for everyone, and the majesty of the Orchestra fades from many if not all of their memories because more pressing demands lay greater claim to their thoughts. So has good been done? If so, was that good anything more than temporal, a single moment breaking the otherwise unceasing grind of poverty?
