Paul Brest is the primary architect of the intellectual content and movement behind strategic philanthropy. He is also my colleague at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. In keeping with a mode of intellectual discourse that he greatly values, I will not spend time here identifying the myriad reasons I am sympathetic to the views he articulates in his article. Instead, I raise some questions about how to understand and evaluate strategic philanthropy.

The core of strategic philanthropy, according to Brest, is adopting an outcome-oriented, expected-benefit mindset toward whatever goal the funder has. Strategic philanthropy is goal agnostic, compatible with whatever the philanthropic passion or interest held by a funder. In Brest’s words, strategic philanthropy is like a having a trip- or flight-plan, charting an effective course toward a destination, monitoring one’s journey along the way, but never involved in setting the destination in the first place.

Goals are set independent of the strategic process, and can be based on reason, interest, or passion. The end is given, and strategy comes in to guide the funder in reaching the end. There’s nothing conceptually awry with conceiving of strategic philanthropy in this way. But I want to register two concerns about such a conceptualization.

First, strategic philanthropy so specified seems to me indistinguishable from means-end or instrumental rationality. Reason is deployed in order to adopt efficacious means to a pre-specified end, where reason need not play any role in determining the end. Which is to say, strategic philanthropy is akin to common sense. Understood this way, strategic philanthropy is nothing new under the sun; indeed, it is as ubiquitous as a sunny day in California. Strategic philanthropy is neither a novel development nor a specialized approach to philanthropy, something practiced by only a relative few. It is nothing more than the deliberate deployment of common sense in the undertaking of philanthropic action. Only those lacking in common sense, driven by emotion rather than reason, would be viewed as un-strategic.

Yet most advocates of strategic philanthropy appear to think that it is rarely practiced. Mark Kramer says that strategic philanthropy does not apply to situations of philanthropy that involve communal membership (e.g., donations to one’s religious congregation) or the maintenance of personal relationships (e.g., donations to the charity favored by a friend or family member), which constitute the vast bulk of charitable giving in the United States. Brest says that “much charity” is un-strategic. But if strategic philanthropy is instrumental rationality—choosing an effective means to an end—to believe that it is rare, we must believe that most funders act without common sense, guided instead one presumes by impulse or passion rather than instrumental reason. Is most charity lacking in common sense? Are most funders acting without instrumental reason?

I find this proposition difficult to believe. For one thing, most donors would deny that they act without common sense, without a flight plan. More fundamentally, what donors could reply is that they are deploying instrumental rationality in their communal memberships or personal relationships. They seek effectively to promote their membership in an associational group, they seek effectively to maintain their personal relationships. So construed, there is nothing un-strategic whatsoever about giving to one’s religious congregation (far more effective for promoting communal membership than donating to a congregation of which one is not a part!) or giving to a friend’s recommended charity (far more effective in maintaining that friendship than rejecting the request for a donation!).

So I ask of the strategic philanthropist: if the adoption of strategic philanthropy is meant to be uncommon, then the content of strategic philanthropy must contain something more than common sense. It must be more than instrumental rationality.

The fact that the strategic mindset is goal-agnostic and can easily be applied to the ends of communal membership and personal relationships leads to my second concern. Why should strategic philanthropy be goal-agnostic? Although it is conceptually coherent to define it this way, there is no conceptual barrier to extend the strategic mindset to ends. And one might think that a person concerned with strategy should be concerned with goal-setting as much as the means to reach a goal. To use Brest’s flight plan metaphor, some destinations are worthier than others. And this is especially so, I would add, when there are great public subsidies, in the form of tax concessions, attached to philanthropy. The public has an interest in philanthropy because of foregone tax revenue, and that interest must, in the most minimal sense, have something to do with philanthropy working on important, rather than trivial, problems. Finally, one might think that a strategic philanthropist should be conscious of a likely interaction between means and ends: depending on the means at one’s disposal, certain ends are not especially rational to set. If the means of transportation at my disposal involve walking, bicycles, or automobiles, I ought not set as my goal any destination that involves crossing an ocean.

Thus, no reason internal to strategic philanthropy would block the deployment of strategy with respect to goal-setting. And there is good reason to believe that a strategic philanthropist, mindful of the public’s interest in philanthropy and the array of means available to him, should take a strategic mindset to the ends worth pursuing. Why does Brest insist upon goal agnosticism?

In conclusion, I wish to raise a question about strategic philanthropy concerning its expected benefit mindset. Brest is careful to avoid equating strategic philanthropy with mere mathematical calculation; it’s for this reason he describes it as a “mindset” rather than a “formula.” But the quantitative approach is clear in the mindset: expected return is equal to benefit multiplied by likelihood of success and divided by total cost.

Later in the essay, Brest rejects the claims that strategic philanthropy focuses on short term over long term remedies and that it is excessively risk averse. I agree entirely. The expected return mindset can be deployed to long-time horizon activities of any risk tolerance. Because uncertainty about success very often increases as the time horizon grows, confidence about how to set the “likelihood of success” variable will decrease over longer time horizons. The mindset or formula easily accommodates different time horizons and risk estimates.

The upshot is that strategic philanthropy implies no focus on short-time horizon or high-likelihood-of-success activities. However, I would note a potential bias in favor of long time horizon activities in cases where the potential benefit is extremely large. This follows straightforwardly from the math: as the benefit gets incalculably large, then expected return will systematically favor high return activities no matter what the risk or chance of success. When the benefit, for instance, is to ward off existential risks and thereby protect humanity and preserve the planet, even a miniscule chance of success will still produce an enormous expected benefit. Strategic philanthropy might seem, therefore, to favor activities such as geo-engineering to stave off the possibility of catastrophic climate change, research to prevent potentially earth-destroying asteroid strikes, calamitous bioterrorism, and extreme technological risks inherent in, say, artificial intelligence. But Brest nowhere discusses such existential risks as a part of strategic philanthropy. Does the definition of strategic philanthropy need to be modified in order to disallow the incalculable benefits of warding off existential risk from swamping all other potential activities?

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