By Bob Tedder • “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy” by Linsey McGoey is a massively researched amalgamation of data, interviews and selected reasonings all designed to skewer one of the world’s fastest growing industries – philantro-capitalism. Generally speaking, McGoey assumes the idealistic role of a latter-day muckraker. Her targets encompass both large charitable organizations and their upper-crust supporters, a group McGoey derisively calls Ted-heads. Specifically, McGoey, like Melville’s Ahab, chases Bill Gates over numerous seas, dutifully lashing herself to his leviathan foundation and, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor, continually stabs it with her steely knife in an attempt to kill the beast. Unfortunately, the good expressed in delineating systemic problems becomes lost in the brimstone whiffs of McGoey’s righteous indignation and specious solutions.
This is a difficult book to categorize and a challenge to read. It is part history, with McGoey reviewing the past giants of American philanthropy, and part investigative reportage identifying the modern equivalents of those so-called robber barons. Regardless of which group McGoey is discussing there is a prevailing tone of vitriputatve condemnation making it difficult to separate ideology from reasoned thought. Concomitant with this observation is a related difficulty in establishing exactly what McGoey’s thesis is and to what degree her impressively arrayed data supports her positions.
With that being said, I plucked the following conclusions from McGoey’s efforts. There has been and is currently a large degree of self aggrandization associated with any charitable organization bearing the originator’s name. Consequently, individuals like Bill and Melinda Gates direct monies to pet projects which, according to McGoey’s reasoning, would if successful lead to headlines of the ilk “Gates Eradicates Polio in Africa.” The large amount of money available has created an entire sub-industry of charitable organizations whose eleesymonary spirit is tempered by undercurrents of profitability.
In one of her more accessible linkages between claim and reality McGoey quotes a well-placed source as stating, in effect, if poverty is ever eliminated the process itself will produce a few billionaires. From this well-reasoned observation McGoey then trots out the shibboleth that foundations would not have money to waste on ill-advised projects if they had been taxed properly. Furthermore, countries needing aid being better positioned to delineate the need would do so from a perspective free from the debilitating conditions inherent in the necessity. The geometry of such arguments is not bolstered by significant proofs.
I suppose most American readers will approach this book from a blue versus red ideological perspective and I am no exception. I do, however, have enough political largesse to blend the two producing a hue commensurate with the purple prose which characterizes the narrative.