August 20, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Giving Pledge keeps giving—as a source of inspiration for philanthropy bloggers, journalists, and commentators.
The Giving Pledge is the effort by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage other rich people to give at least half their money away. So far, they’ve succeeded in convincing 40 rich people and families to take the pledge.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Dennis says the Gateses and Mr. Buffett aren’t likely to have anywhere near the positive impact in their philanthropy as they’ve had in their business lives. Ms. Dennis, president of the Searle Freedom Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes free-market policies, asks readers to “think for a moment: Can you point to a single charitable accomplishment that has been as transformative as, say, the cellphone or the birth-control pill?”
Ms. Dennis also wonders why businesspeople feel they have a responsibility to “give back.”
“Giving back implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken?” she writes. “Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned from investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value.”
Ron Rosenbaum, a writer for the online-magazine Slate, also says the pledge needs some rejiggering. But he approaches that argument from a very different perspective.
“Show us the money if you want the credit,” he writes. “And show it to us now, before you die, not in some distant future where a lot of poor and diseased people will themselves have died for lack of timely aid.”
The philanthropist Lewis B. Cullman also has a skeptical view of the Giving Pledge, telling The Wall Street Journal that money donated by the megarich too often ends up locked within foundations that release only a trickle of support.
“My opinion [of the pledge] is: So what?” said Mr. Cullman, a benefactor of New York cultural institutions who the Journal says has given hundreds of millions away. He says that foundations should be required to spend more than the currently mandated 5 percent of their assets, or adopt “sunset clauses” to distribute their assets within a set time.
What’s your take in this continuing debate?
