“No-strings giving” is transforming philanthropy

It is certainly difficult to make money. But should money be difficult to give away? In the Gilded Age, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller worried about waste and misuse; Carnegie wrote in 1889 that $950 of every $1,000 that went to charity was “unwisely spent”. Around the turn of the millennium a new cohort of businessmen-philanthropists such as Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, looked to data and rules as a way to stop waste. Donors ran lengthy application processes, provided funds that were ring-fenced for specific uses and enforced painstaking reporting requirements. In 2006 The Economist called it “philanthrocapitalism”.