In her attempt to be the last sent to the guillotine by the mob, MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has been quick to shed billions from her record-setting divorce settlement. Scott, whose divorce rendered her the third wealthiest woman on the planet, announced another slew of donations on Tuesday totaling $2.7 billion to 286 different recipients, citing the much-maligned wealth gap.
“Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisors — we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” Scott wrote in her Medium post announcing the new set of donations. “In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”
Scott is correct that other organizations can maximize the greatest return on investment of a donation. In practice, however, she and her team have failed to give her billions to the people capable of doing just that.
It’s hard to fault anyone for donating $2.7 billion, especially when she already donated $5.8 billion last year. Her sentiments are laudatory. But the opportunity cost of Scott’s donations is real and, compared to whom she could have contributed her cash, her actual philanthropy is extraordinarily weak.
Recipients in this latest round of donations include the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, the Decolonizing Wealth Project, and a slew of arts and music organizations. Not every recipient is so performatively woke, but none constitute the best use of money.
For $2.7 billion, Scott could have saved 90,000 African lives by donating to organizations providing malaria medications and nets, vitamin A supplements, and cash incentives for life-saving childhood vaccinations. And how do we know this? Because despite the hubris of Scott and her team, actual organizations such as Givewell and Giving What We Can exist solely to vet and find individual charities that use donations most effectively.
Sure, not every dollar donated needs to be decided solely on the return of its investment for the greater good. We all acknowledge that donating to your church or your local theater won’t save lives, but those things are important anyway. But given Scott’s explicit goal of reducing global wealth and racial inequities, saving the lives and health of 90,000 Africans seems like a hell of a better commitment to that goal than donating to a slew of public colleges that actually exacerbate our racial wealth gap. The actual opportunity cost of Scott choosing performative philanthropy over effective altruism is quite literally tens of thousands of lives.
It’s nice of Scott to give away money that she didn’t actually earn, but if her stated goal is to reduce global inequality, she’d be better off choosing efficient charities over woke ones.
