Rick Perry readying for a ride in a military chopper in his most recent campaign advertisement.

The first 40 seconds or so are scenes straight out of an Orwellian dystopian fantasy, depicting the United States’ normally vibrant metropolitan hubs empty as a direct consequence of President Obama’s failed economic policies. Toss in a few ultra-pessimistic political pundits’ prognoses for economic recovery with some arbitrary statistics on American poverty, and you have an altogether depressing image of America. The first segment ends with President Obama boldly asserting he is “just getting started.”

Move forward to the next minute worth of content and you have the polar opposite; President Obama’s dramatic foil is manifested in a smooth-talking, inspirational Rick Perry. Professional camera angles and maneuvers capture the image of a presidential candidate in touch with the most basic needs of the American people – from the urgency of job creation to an intrepid foreign policy that does not “apologize” for America’s greatness. The recurring image of children basking in American pride and smiling faces affirms the wave of optimism that would readily sweep the country upon Perry’s election. The best days lie ahead, we are assured.

Let’s be blunt for a second. What does it say of our political culture if we have advertisements that say nothing about our platforms and conform to some vague, broad, universal thematic strand that virtually every American embraces? Though it may be an idiosyncrasy of mine, I cannot fathom why the American people would rather be coddled (and give Perry almost 30% of the party’s support) by familiar political jargon than confronted with substantive issues.

Where are the ads that discuss Perry’s newfound zeal in stripping the Federal Reserve of some of its monetizing powers and its role in the 2008 financial meltdown? Or how about ads that clarify his increasingly controversial ideas on immigration and Social Security? During an election in which it has become more commonplace to buck political precedents and hash out a distinct role politically, why is no one making a determined effort to distinguish themselves from the pack and engage the American people in an issues-based discussion?

It may sound unsavory to compile an advertisement for the American people that does not tug at the heartstrings via associative imagery, but it is time to speak to us as adults and not some shallow adjudicators who prefer charisma to reason.

Photo Credits: RickPerry.org

Both communities face widespread stereotypes, and are justifiably concerned with public relations.

Last year, I wrote a post on the gay rights movement where I suggested that gay rights activists should focus less on shocking the public and more on emphasizing the positive things people in the gay community were doing. I proposed that instead of spreading curse-laden viral videos, they should run profiles of average gay Americans.

“You want to make a campaign centered on viral online videos? Here’s an idea. Make a series of video profiles of gay people who have done or are doing cool stuff. These don’t have to be celebrities or earth shatteringly impressive people. Just normal, admirable, everyday people.  You don’t even have to mention that they’re gay until the end of the video; just make a nice profile and then have the person look at the camera and say, “I’m gay.  And I would like my rights please.”

So far, gay rights activists haven’t taken my advice.

But Mormons have.

A new ad campaign focuses on the people that make up the little-understood religious community.

It’s an effective campaign. And with two presidential candidates (assuming you still count Jon Huntsman) who are Mormon, it’s perfectly timed.

photo credit: mckaycoppins.com

The question, of course, answers itself. In January the Supreme Court blew the starting gun, and since then the big-money donors have been racing to the November finish. Spending on political TV ads is on track to top 2008 levels, and one analyst predicts it will exceed $3 billion when all is said and done.

Especially unnerving is the fact that Republicans and Democrats have raised and spent eerily similar amounts (the Dems trail by just a few million). What this suggests is that the parties are in a financial arms race, matching each other dollar for dollar. To end the vicious circle, both sides need to cooperate and back down; unilateral disarmament is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, at this time, only one side thinks there’s a problem here. You can call Democrats hypocritical for raising funds from special interests and big donors and then railing against the corruption of American elections, but I’ll take hypocritical over malevolent any day.

And direct election spending is only the beginning. As Jane Mayer of The New Yorker recently reported, Charles and David Koch (the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, an enormous but little-known conglomerate, and longtime libertarian sugar daddies) have been funding the anti-Obama backlash from day one. It’s more than TV ads; it’s leadership training seminars, buses and supplies for protesters, stipends for think-tank shills—all of it coming from a treasure chest of oil and chemical money.

Of course, liberals and Democrats have their big donors, too. George Soros, the billionaire speculator, helped found the Center of American Progress, the liberal counterpart to Koch-backed think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But Mayer suggests that the Koch brothers are more insidious because their donations directly promote their corporate self-interest. When the owners of oil refineries support climate-change skepticism and the producers of toxic carcinogens lobby against the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s fair to say their reasons aren’t purely ideological.

Digging into motivations is, of course, tricky business. Tim Mak, a reporter for FrumForum.com who was previously a Koch Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, defends his benefactors by arguing that “funding a plethora of free-market groups seems like an odd path to profit.” Mak continues, “If these organizations exist to serve the corporate interests of Koch Industries, why not replace them with a lobbying firm that would directly advocate on the niche issues that affect their businesses?” But Mak’s question is easy to answer: lobbies that promote corporate interests garner suspicion, but think tanks with scholarly veneers and “grassroots” organizations seeded with corporate money seem a lot less fishy to most people.

Still, Mak is probably right that the Koch brothers “genuinely believe that free-market methods are the path to prosperity.” Very few people are so cynical that they can’t even convince themselves of their own integrity. The point isn’t that libertarian ideology is a mere cover for corporate interests; it’s that the overlap between them shows that the ideology isn’t very good. For instance, Koch Industries has opposed the EPA’s classification of formaldehyde, of which it produces 2.2 billion pounds a year, as a carcinogen (which it is). Whether the Koch brothers’ anti-regulation ideology is sincere or not is sort of beside the point.

The brothers have also been major financial supporters of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party-backing Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and heavily funded by the Kochs, plans to spend $45 million on the midterm elections. It’s not that there wouldn’t be a Tea Party without the help of big donors like the Koch brothers; there was an egg of conservative cultural resentment before there came the chicken of the Tea Party movement. But there’s no doubt that the Kochs are getting their money’s worth. As David Koch said at an Americans for Prosperity meeting last year, “Days like today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this organization, five years ago.”

This is the central irony of contemporary conservative politics: here’s a mass movement whose essential theme is populist, which is motivated by pangs of powerlessness and alienation, yet which is underwritten by wealthy, powerful, cosmopolitan ideologues. When the conservative movement scores a success, as it is primed to do in November, the check-writers’ economic interests are invariably advanced; the social and cultural interests of the foot soldiers are usually not.

To point out its big-money backers is not to dismiss the Tea Party as a mere “Astroturf” movement, as many liberals do. Money helps, but it isn’t everything. Where money really does the most work, or the most damage, is during the immediate election season. That’s when it is used to fund appeals to the whole voting population, rather than for organizing hardcore activists and supplying protesters. Even when they’re enabled by the likes of the Koch brothers, the latter activities are hard to get riled up about. It is essentially democratic behavior. But when the big money goes toward slippery, mendacious advertising, its supporters coyly hidden behind innocuous names like Americans for Prosperity, the democratic decision-making process is corrupted.

The first step in fighting this corruption is to require complete transparency. In Minnesota, we recently saw a good example of how this should work. Target and Best Buy each contributed six-figure sums to a group supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, a far-right social conservative. The retailers liked Emmer’s pro-business policies, but didn’t consider the full set of positions to which they were lending their support. Thanks in part to Minnesota’s strong campaign-finance laws, the donations were revealed, the companies were embarrassed, and their shareholders demanded a review of their political contribution policies.

This is a model of how campaign finance laws ought to work. We need stronger disclosure requirements to make sure that, if corporations are going to give freely to political causes, the people at least can hold them accountable. Unfortunately the Democrats’ attempt to pass the DISCLOSE Act fell short, and, if corporate donors like the Koch brothers have their way, the midterms will make progress on campaign finance reform even more unlikely.

This column first appeared in the Sept. 16 issue of the Harvard Independent.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of dolphinsdock

The fight bears watching for a few reasons. This is New York, a crucible of city journalism, a place that has seen newspaper wars for almost three centuries. At one time or another, the city has hosted over 20 newspapers, but this time around, it is not a couple of scrappy tabloids in the fray, but broadsheet behemoths with ambitions to match.

I haven’t seen the WSJ NY edition, but I’d like to. For all the wailing about the death of print, you have to give credit to the one man who’s betting on expanding print: Rupert Murdoch. It certainly makes for a striking contrast with Katherine Weymouth, Washington Post publisher, who visited Harvard recently. She spoke as though her job were to bail out a sinking ship (made of newspaper). Mr. Murdoch, dumping $30 million into a New York daily, well, he’s full speed ahead on the Titanic.

Or is he? Maybe the economics do work out. The Times’ greatest costs are its expensive national and foreign bureaus. Since the WSJ already faces these big fixed costs, creating a New York team should be relatively cheap. Here, then, is an affordable way to tap into a the largest local advertising market in America. Then again, maybe Murdoch just wants to get into a fight with the New York Times. Either way, things are heating up in the ink on dead trees market once more…

On May 15, 2004, Nelson Mandela wept on stage when South Africa was chosen to host the 2010 World Cup, and then-president Thabo Mbeki declared that “South Africa’s time has come.” Experts worldwide predicted that the World Cup would be a transformative and unifying moment in the country’s history and a harbinger of political, economic, and social change.

Nearly six years later, however, these expectations continue to cloak a sobering reality. The development thought to be associated with sporting mega-events often fails to materialize, and South Africa seems to be no exception to this rule. Any changes derived from hosting the soccer tournament will be more symbolic than real, more mental and sentimental than economic or quantifiable.

Great Expectations

With more member nations than the United Nations, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has the potential to exert great influence in the international arena. After announcing South Africa as the host of the 2010 World Cup, FIFA launched the “Win in Africa with Africa” campaign “to provide the continent with tools to progress and the skills with which it can continue its own development.”

FIFA’s optimism was immediately embraced by the African National Congress, the United Nations, and the European Union, each of which hailed the tournament as a promising developmental and political project for South Africa and for the entire African continent.

The idea that the World Cup will remake South Africa’s image both at home and abroad may be one of the most prevalent expectations. Scarlett Cornelissen, professor of political science at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, told the HPR that successfully hosting the tournament “could signal to the outside world that South Africa is at the forefront of development and modernity.” And Peter Alegi, the author of Laduma!: Soccer, Politics, and Society in South Africa, told the HPR that the tournament may bring South Africans together in the manner of 1995 Rugby World Cup, recently dramatized in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus.

“There is the likelihood that the World Cup tournament will generate enough national pride that it will temporarily unite South Africans in a society that is still very much divided due to the legacy of apartheid and racism,” Alegi explained. By changing the way that the world sees African cities and cultures, the World Cup presents a prime opportunity to reshape perceptions of South Africa and the continent.

Expectations of an economic boon have also been widespread. Any economic improvements will hang on the success, both during and after the tournament, of ten newly built and renovated mega-stadiums around the country. Orli Bass, coeditor of Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup, told the HPR that many South Africans celebrated stadium construction projects as sources of immediate job creation, local investment, and increased tourism, with “many of the poorer people who have few job prospects looking towards the World Cup as a cure-all.” For many South Africans, the tournament seems to offer a stage, not only for the display of national pride and community, but also for showcasing the country’s economic progress.

Beyond Expectations

The 2010 World Cup has thus been hailed as the seed for South African revival. But the soil remains relatively infertile. South Africa continues to face a host of challenges: from poverty, homelessness, and unemployment to violent crime, HIV/AIDS, and a fragile race and class structure lingering from apartheid. The urgency of these issues calls into question the feasibility and appropriateness of South Africa’s campaign to host the World Cup.

As Chris Bolsmann, co-author of South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond, told the HPR, “South Africans are very, very aware of what the cost of the World Cup is actually going to be to us and has been to us when we have serious issues of unemployment, inequality, HIV/AIDS, and very little access to basic services.” Genuine and sustained development will mean addressing these issues, and the World Cup will likely fail to achieve significant change in this regard.

According to the South African National Treasury, various levels of government have spent over $3.8 billion on infrastructure projects for the tournament. These expenditures have diverted resources from government programs tailored to tackle poverty, unemployment, crime, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As Alegi noted, “spending for the World Cup is a drop in the ocean” for the national government, but “spending on the local level has a huge impact on things like  providing health care access to poor people and building adequate homes for the homeless.”

This diversion of funds, according to Bass, has sparked local resentment and controversy. “In many of the big cities, there have been increased riots and demonstrations with people demanding delivery of services,” she observed. There are also doubts about the wisdom of investments in hostels, roads, and stadiums from which few South Africans are likely to benefit in the long run.

Even the anticipated economic boost from increased tourism seems unrealistic in light of historical precedent. A study conducted by economics professors Robert Baade and Victor Matheson after the 1994 World Cup found that nine of the 13 U.S. host cities actually experienced declines in income growth after the tournament. Likewise, studies have shown that, apart from breweries, money-exchange offices, and producers of tabletop football, few domestic businesses experienced long-term benefits from the 2006 World Cup in Germany. It seems likely, then, that the 2010 World Cup’s supposed contributions to economic development have been overstated.

Legacy 2010

The run-up to the 2010 World Cup has revealed a South African government more concerned with political advertising and imagery than the hard tasks of governing. Following FIFA’s lead, the South African government has used the World Cup to construct an image of a modern and progressive South Africa, implying that the returns on this marketing will act as a panacea for the country’s social and economic problems.

Unfortunately, the failure to integrate this campaign with other social-service and development programs may undermine everyone’s high expectations. The 2010 World Cup has been marked by an infectious optimism that encourages big-picture thinking above local issues and needs. Nonetheless, the South African marketing campaign is more than baseless hype, at least on a symbolic level. Even the emptiest rhetoric can bring common purpose to a still fragmented country and continent.

South Africa’s most pressing problems, however, remain entrenched in its social and economic fabric. Problems such as high unemployment and HIV/AIDS demand solutions that go beyond stoking national pride. The World Cup promises 31 days of exciting soccer and an invigorated and confident host country. But unless South Africa’s infrastructural and economic preparations are better integrated into a broader social program, the tournament will fall short of lofty expectations.

Taylor Helgren ‘11 is a Contributing Writer. Kathy Lee ‘13 is Staff Director.

Photo Credit: Flickr Stream of mitchelljohn

New online business model will help the press serve the public good

Early next year, when the New York Times begins to enforce a metered system in order to charge for its online content, millions of readers will have to decide if that content is worth the price. For a few short years, the Times has been available at no cost online, even as it and the entire journalism sector have suffered major financial difficulties. The new online business model may help put the ailing newspaper industry back on course, and without hurting access to information.

The Times has given itself a year before it implements the recently announced change, and it provided few details in its announcement, in part because the “logistics are being worked out and decisions are still being made,” as Richard L. Berke, the national editor, told the HPR. What is clear is that there will be a metered system, meaning that a user’s first few articles up to a monthly limit will be free, after which the user will have to pay. Such a system is more similar to that of the Financial Times than to the pay-wall of the Wall Street Journal, which makes some articles free and requires subscriptions for others. The number of free articles and the price of additional articles or subscriptions may change over time, but the metered system should not be considered experimental. As Berke told the HPR, “This isn’t something I think we’d turn back on anytime soon.”

CHANGING WHAT YOU READ

Naturally, a price on access to the Times website will decrease its readership among those least willing and able to pay. But this does not necessarily mark the end of equal access to information. Although many news organizations are expected to charge for online content if the Times’ restructuring proves profitable, not all will. Maralee Schwartz, national political editor of the Washington Post, told the HPR that Katherine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher and CEO, “does not believe in charging for online content.” Schwartz also said that the Times’ decision to charge may be “an advantage for the Post.” Indeed, some online news sources may stay free precisely because they are looking to pick up traffic from metered sites.

The Post’s decision not to charge for online content should quell any fears that we are headed into an era in which independent bloggers will be the only free online news sources. Professor Nolan Bowie of the Harvard Kennedy School explained the dangers of such a scenario: “Journalists, not newspapers, are the essential public goods, and we can’t rely on unpaid professionals.” Opinions may differ on just how necessary paid, old-school journalists remain, but in any case there is no reason to think that the Times is spelling the end of accessible and credentialed journalism.

For these reasons, access to broadband Internet, rather than access to the New York Times’ online articles, will remain the main obstacle to equal access to information. As Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, told the HPR, “Online newspapers, even if they charge, will be much less expensive than paper. … The main issue is getting broadband Internet access to all levels of society.” Free online content is not actually free; it just has no marginal cost. As more of our press moves online—for example, the Detroit Free Press has limited home deliveries and shrunk the size of its physical paper—broadband access will become ever more important for staying well-informed, and a subscription to the New York Times’ website, compared to broadband, will cost relatively little.

CHANGING WHAT THEY WRITE?

As newspaper readerships and revenue sources change, it is important to consider whether and how content may change. The newspaper industry insists that readership and revenue do not affect content; as Berke said, “[We] want an audience, but our basic journalistic decisions are based on journalism.” Even if business considerations actually do affect content decisions, the shift to new revenue streams could actually improve the quality of news coverage. Isaacson explained that a shift towards dependence on users—rather than on advertisers—could lead to an increase in the number of sites serving “an audience that wanted straight and credible news” instead of an audience seeking articles “telling [them] where the best golf course is.” Advertisers like rich people, and so news outlets that want advertisers often need to cater, at least in certain sections, to the tastes of the wealthy.

If the Times‘ online business model proves profitable, it may even subsidize the paper’s primary public service: investigative reporting. For decades, newspapers’ advertising and subscription revenues supported such services, but recent financial troubles have led to cutbacks. For example, the San Diego Union-Tribune closed its Washington bureau shortly after winning a Pulitzer Prize for its investigations into former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Now,  if new sources of revenue are effective, news organizations may be able to afford their investigative bureaus. As Schwartz explained, “Every news organization has to do what’s going to support its own type of journalism best.”

JOURNALISTIC DIVERSITY

But each organization defines its type of journalism differently, and that diversity is important to ensuring that information is widespread, accurate, and not subject to control by a few. Big media corporations, Bowie explained, have large professional staffs and “safety nets through litigation insurance,” and thus maintain a comparative advantage in investigative reporting. Small media outlets help ensure that the flow of information is not controlled by a select few. If different sources of revenue do not lead to different journalistic decisions, then a profitable new business model will help support the existing types of journalism. But if the source of revenue does affect content, then, according to Isaacson, “a mix of models—some free, some ad-supported, some user-supported, and some a mix—will give us the greatest diversity [of content].”

In the history of America’s press, free access to an elite newspaper is an unusual phenomenon to say the least. And the experiment with free access has severely hurt the journalism industry; for the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that newspapers must either change their revenue tactics or face extinction. Now the New York Times’ new online business model may give us the best of both worlds: the diversity of the Internet, and the trustworthiness of the old media.

Jeff Kalmus ’12 is the Webmaster.

Photo Credit: jphilipq (Flickr), Funky Tee (Flickr)

Flagstaff Lake, Maine

Last summer I worked for five weeks as a member of an Appalachian Trail crew, living in tents in Northern Maine while performing maintenance on the trail. Apparently I gave them my mailing address, because yesterday I received “The MAINEtainer,” an eight-page newspaper from the Maine Appalachian Trail Club (MATC). One headline stood out: “MATC opposes Highland Plantation wind energy plan.” The article included a map of the area around the proposed Highland Plantation, and I recognized it as Flagstaff Lake, where I spent a week cutting new trail out of the side of a hill with a mattock. The area is part of the ‘Hundred-Mile Wilderness,’ the longest stretch of the entire Appalachian Trail without a town or store.

MATC opens by summarizing their opposition to the installation of wind turbines two miles from the trail: “The MATC recognizes the need to develop wind power as a renewable energy source.  However, this need must be balanced against the recreational, scenic, natural, and cultural resources of the Appalachian Trail in Maine.”

For decades, environmentalists have taken the wrong approach in their advocacy, and MATC’s opposition to the Highland Plantation project is a prime example. Like Thoreau, who wrote, “All good things are wild and free,” they assume and promote an emotional reverence for nature. The assumption misses the point: the true reason to protect the environment is not for the environment’s sake but for our own. Rather than emphasizing this hard fact, environmental groups have relied on a sentimental argument for the intrinsic value of untamed nature, producing cultural antipathy and misguided environmentalism.

Arguing for a deep reverence for nature immediately evokes the 1960s counterculture, an association which mires the environmental debate deep in the baggage of America’s forty-year-old culture war.Consider any of various news stories detailing the latest extreme tactics of anti-whaling activists.  The general public cares little one way or another about whales, but most have a sense of whether or not their political group supports saving whales.  So all the vitriol of a culturally divided nation springs up before anyone can ask why we should care about whales in the first place.  Some people just like whales and think they’re worth saving; others do not.

The World Wildlife Fund is not a radical nut chained to a harpoon cannon, but its arguments for the natural world are not much more complex than the hippie yell, “Save the whales!”  Their standard advertising campaign is essentially a guilt trip featuring pictures of the fuzziest endangered species they can find.  Their species adoption program allows you to donate in the name of a certain animal like the panda, Amur leopard, polar bear, or tiger.  Never mind that your money goes into a general fund; you can feel good knowing that you have helped save the meerkats.  The entire campaign depends on the assumption that there is inherent moral value in these species.  Save the meerkats because they are cute.  Save the leopards because they look noble in the setting sun.

Similarly, the argument for reducing carbon emissions is often simplistic.  Carbon dioxide produced by industry is disrupting the natural balance, so reduce carbon dioxide.  MATC seems to think that we should preserve the Hundred-Mile Wilderness simply because it is wild and beautiful, without unsightly wind turbines.  Environmentalism of this sort depends on a hippie ethos of secular reverence for nature in its purest form.

Little wonder, then, that vocal skepticism of climate change appears to be growing.  Actual science is irrelevant to the issue, because the argument for environmentalism has been cast by environmentalists themselves as a cultural crusade promoting reverence for nature, and cultural crusaders must expect to find stiff resistance.

The crusader’s approach is a terrible mistake, not just because it motivates opposition along cultural lines, but because it is the wrong way to understand our relationship with the environment.  Thoreau-style environmentalists would claim that our capitalist economy spoils the environment, but the very word ‘spoil’ implies, incorrectly, that there exists an absolute, external definition of what a pristine environment looks like.  Rather, economy and environment are inextricably linked in a circular relationship, each shaping the other.  Just as Native Americans used to burn their forest’s undergrowth to produce a healthy deer population and make it easier to hunt those deer, we must devise a sustainable model for the ongoing interaction between our globalized economy and the natural world on which it depends.

In short, we need to manage our environment for our own long-term benefit, not for the whale’s benefit.  Our long-term interests should include a healthy whale population, but we must remember it is for our own good, not theirs.  Recent emphasis on efficiency and sustainability is the right direction to take, but these movements have not yet managed to shed their association with the ever-more-stale teachings of the counterculture.  It is our job, as a fresh generation, to forcibly recast environmentalism in practical terms.

Yes, Flagstaff Lake has a prehistoric beauty about it, but its wildness is a pretty fiction, not an intrinsic good.  The lake was created by a hydroelectric dam in 1950, deliberately submerging the town of Flagstaff in the process.  Rather than clinging to a cultural reverence for a false wilderness, we should plan for the future and install wind turbines in Northern Maine.  Then, perhaps, with the counterculture behind us, we can move past the culture wars and create a working model for an environmentally sustainable economy.

Can capitalism work for charity?

Economists are no strangers to knee-jerk argumentation. Their soundest arguments are often those that strike most sharply at the beliefs non-economists hold dear, and statistics are not often enough to unseat them. Conventional wisdom, then, would suggest that Dan Pallotta should lower his expectations for the controversial argument laid out in Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. He wants charities to cease being non-profits and get in the business of making money, paid advertisements and high executive salaries, and fundraising that takes risks and investment in the long term rather than only in immediate relief. Luckily, conventional wisdom may be wrong; Uncharitable is a well organized, deliberately reasoned, and deeply convincing work, backed by strong and important economic arguments for such a system. Moreover, Pallotta succeeds by transcending economics to address a broad range of objections with historical, psychological, and ethical analyses.

Economically, Pallotta’s argument is simple and appealing, though perhaps somewhat high-strung (the problem is serious, but calling it an “economic apartheid” may be going a bit far). Pallotta explains that capitalist tools such as advertising, appropriate compensation, and long-term investment are the keys to traditional companies’ successes. Naturally, charities would also benefit from these tools, but because they are prohibited from turning a profit, they are essentially constantly forced to give as much of their money to the cause as they can. This prevents charities from growing, experimenting, and innovating, and since they are essentially competing with for-profit companies for people’s money, they are put at a huge disadvantage.

A problem of prudishness

Ethically, however, the situation can still appear to be an unholy trade-off. We may end up helping more people when using capitalist tools, but how can we justify profiting from suffering? The great success of this book is how Pallotta identifies and transcends this supposed conflict and shows that doing good and doing well do not have to be mutually exclusive.

He begins by identifying the origin of the idea that charity must involve self-sacrifice: Puritanism. Calvinist Puritans encouraged hard work and economic prosperity but believed wealth to be corruptive. This paradoxical view of affluence resulted in a system where one was required to give one’s wealth to charity as penance, causing altruism and sacrifice became conflated. While his explanation is appealing it is also rather ambitious; one would be hard-pressed to find any cultural supports for the conflation of altruism and personal gain. In fact, the varied religious tenets against usury suggest that our instinctive guilt arises not from some vestigial Puritanism but from an aversion to exploitation that is part of a deeper moral sensibility.

A new kind of charity

Nevertheless, the point Pallotta makes is groundbreaking: he suggests a wedding of capitalism and altruism. Going forward, society should treat giving to charity like purchasing any other good. He believes that if charities can compete with non-charities on even ground, then they will surely find a healthy demand. Altruism itself is self-interested because people like to help others. He argues that left to our own devices, without guilt or religion or obligation commanding us, we can still be trusted to be good people. It is a hopeful, affirming point that has implications beyond the corporate structure of non-profits.

Pallotta has an impressive grasp of the character of the problem. He is fighting against an instinctive, deeply rooted notion, and does so by drawing on human psychology, and simple economic logic. At the end of the day, people who give to charities want to do good for other, and the tools of capitalism will allow charities to do good better. Therefore, society ought to consider setting charities free from the constraints of self-sacrifice and short-term efficiency, allowing them to do more with our self-interest in helping others. The key to liberating charities from their shackles lies in the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of society, which gives some idea of the sheer size of the challenge posed. Changes of government policy are not enough. Pallotta believes that charities can change the world, but those agreeing with him will have nearly as much work to do to get there.