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I have begun to think that a lot of my disagreements within the "good works" industry are down to my political temperament. Here& #39;s an example. https://hbr.org/2017/09/audacious-philanthropy">https://hbr.org/2017/09/a...
I absolutely agree that the world needs more long-term funding, not just in "philanthropy" but for literally every single human endeavour. So do I agree with the headline of the article? Yes.
But then I read the article and, while it makes some good points, it starts to get stuck in my throat. It& #39;s partly the word choices; it& #39;s my belief that the invasion by management-speak is a symptom of how late capitalism seeks to colonise good works, first by co-opting language.
But then:
This is a section of the article entitled "Build a Shared Understanding of the Problem and Its Ecosystem", and it doesn& #39;t talk about what "Big Tobacco" actually did, which was to corrupt public discourse, first in the US and then globally, in defense of big business.
(Read Merchants of Doubt by @NaomiOreskes and ErikMConway for the historical details, and be prepared to get very angry indeed.)
That seems like a pretty big omission in an article that is nominally about "system change", because in the grand scheme of things, it was the promoters of agnōsis who really won; it& #39;s the template for why we& #39;re now having bullshit discussions about whether Covid-19 is real.
They go on to talk about Aravind Eye Hospitals, which is an amazing initiative which has helped so many people. It doesn& #39;t seem to have changed "the system" of Indian health care, though, which remains a problematic patchwork of good and bad (Aravind being one of the good).
That& #39;s relevant because it appears in the section entitled "Design Approaches That Will Work at Massive Scale", and India is certainly context of massive scale - the most massive, in fact. Yet does Aravind Eye Hospitals work at a massive scale, in that context?
And finally: Sesame Street, which appears in the section "Drive (Rather than Assume) Demand". I have serious questions about what the phrase "system change" even means when you apply it to Sesame Street, but did it "drive demand"?
It seems more likely that there was a generation of under-served children and a cohort of harassed adults, who together generated a high level of demand. Thankfully it was Sesame Street that met that demand, rather than some ne& #39;er-do-well TV executive with a line of toys to sell.
