What are you passionate about?
There’s this pervasive idea that when people get together as a government, problems get solved, and the world generally becomes a better place.
The combination of incompetence, graft, and bureaucracy creates an unwinnable situation where several million dollars at a time are spent on things that don’t even solve the problem. Take the issue of teachers not being paid well. Instead of paying teachers well, the formal representation of the teachers instead push for hiring more teachers and support staff, creating a stalemate, while spending more money.
Even principally, most people don’t know a good idea when it hits them square across the jaw, and I’m supposed to believe a democratically accountable body of people who barely know the three branches of government will subscribe to speculative economic analysis? The idea is laughable.
Thus, popular support and bureaucratic challenges are no allies in the fight for solving social problems.
This leaves 3-4 general areas where we can tackle social problems. Before I go on, I’d like to clarify that there are no silver bullets and that rarely if ever does one unified approach always work best. With that in mind, the four remaining options are large scale nonprofits, local organizations and groups, corporations (large scale private sector), and social entrepreneurship.
Large scale nonprofits face an existential dilemma when they seek to solve their problems. How do they continue to justify their existence? Instead of looking for realistic solutions, the agents who make up these forms of organization often pretend as if no progress is made, and spend much of the support on operations. Some of them can be better than others though. And, not all social issues can be resolved, and are instead managed and improved.
For instance, donating to prevent malaria in the developing world is often a better investment than donating to stop sex trafficking because sex trafficking is already a well-known and funded issue. Whereas similarly worthy goals, like trying to prevent children from dying of Malaria, are often neglected and could do more with each marginal dollar.
I think effective altruists get it right that we should focus on the issues we have the most leverage in, but I often struggle to trust the individuals who make these analyses, given drama in the community.
Next are local organizations and groups. They often serve as institutions to create order in specific locations. Their primary benefit is that their work can be assessed somewhat easily, and because they live in the community affected by a given issue, there’s a stronger incentive to complete the task, especially because these groups are often built upon other foundations. For instance, a church trying to solve hunger in a community is likely to succeed because its existence is more a function of a gathering of likeminded people in a community rather than a specific ideological or social goal. The kicker is that because these groups are so locally focused, there‘s little justification for effective management or scaling. A priest may easily say “my job is to teach about God, not run a multi-state organization.” So, local organizations may be limited because of their smaller ambition.
Established corporations run into many of the same problems that governments do. They are large, unwieldy, and coordinating action can be challenging. At the same time, they can focus their philanthropic efforts on solving problems, but likely want to avoid bad public relations, and choose topics that are already broadly popular. Large corporations tend to be pretty good at managing and getting things done, but can still be limited by procedure.
Social entrepreneurship on the other hand focuses on figuring out how solving problems can make money. If I know that loneliness is an issue in my community, I can build a business helping people change themselves. I like the knowledge that I can largely do what I want in order to see it succeed. Some challenges that social entrepreneurship faces include the potential exploitation of the vulnerable, potentially unprofitable problems to solve, and small scale. Typically a social entrepreneur focuses on one problem, largely without major institutional support.
Despite this, I think social entrepreneurship is neglected and exciting! It’s a chance to do something you’re passionate about while potentially being able to make a lot of cash.
Isadore Johnson's Website 