“Charity Doesn’t Solve Anything” -Mexican Billionaire

So, you work for a nonprofit your whole life, in the hopes that something will change from your efforts, that your cause will have made a dent in the problem. If you stay with a nonprofit long enough, you can start to see, with your own eyes, that your organization and the partnerships you’ve built are helping the world, bit by bit, even if it’s not as grand as you hoped in the beginning. But the changes are there.

But according to Carlos Slim, what you’re doing doesn’t matter.

Here we are, giving a man authority to speak, simply because he is rich.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “Carlos Slim has always had a complicated relationship with philanthropy. The Mexican billionaire, who Forbes still lists as the world’s richest man, said in 2007 that he could do more to help fight poverty by building businesses than by “being a Santa Claus.”

Carlos Slim Helú is a Mexican businessman and one of the richest people in the world. Slim has a substantial influence over the telecommunications industry in Mexico and much of Latin America as well. He controls Teléfonos de México (Telmex), Telcel and América Móvil companies. Slim’s critics claim that he is a monopolist, noting that his company Telmex (built over the course of several decades with tax-payers’ money) controls 90% of the Mexican landline telephone market. The contrast between Slim’s wealth and the poverty of much of Mexico’s population is also troubling to critics. Slim’s wealth is equal to roughly 7% of Mexico’s annual economic output: an astronomical figure compared to that of America’s top billionaires.

At a conference in Australia in August, 2010, Mr. Slim said that charity accomplishes little.

“The only way to fight poverty is with employment,” he said. “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the last 50 years, and they don’t solve anything.”

I agree that the best way to help people is to help them be self-sufficient. For example, aid is well and good, but I think that if we helped Congolese survivors of rape to build their own successful businesses, they would start to gather the resources and money required to protect themselves from mass rape by militia and gangs.

However, what Mr. Slim fails to understand is that charity is not synonymous with handouts. Charity can help build jobs for people. Charity can save lives. The nonprofit sector may be inefficient, and it may be inept, but I would argue that if nonprofits were actually allowed to go after social ills with the resources that for-profit mega-corps have, they might have more results.

In other words, if Mr. Slim wants to create jobs, he has the resources to do so.

According to his wikipedia page, Mr. Slim was worth $40 million by the time he was 26. He has obviously never worked at a charity, and perhaps has never seen the ripple results of his own philanthropy. One school that he gave money to might produce 10-15 engineering students, who could help the country and give back to their communities.

There are thousands of charities working on job training and creation, such as Oregon Tradewomen, Louisiana Green Corps, JFYNetworks in Boston, etc.

When people who have a telecom monopoly and earn $27 million PER DAY (in a country which has a per capita average income of $17,000 per year) stand outside of nonprofits, charities and the mechanics of helping others and say that charity doesn’t do anything, we want to ask ourselves,

“Why do they have authority to speak on this subject?”

and

What is wrong with them that they are not giving back more of their income to their own country and forcing so many people to live in abject poverty?

Phil Cubeta writes of Mr. Slim,

“Perhaps the corporate form should be revised, not unlike the B-Corp, to make it mandatory that corporations have an operative social conscience, or like a human psychopath, be treated as mad.

The issue is not whether we will have socially conscious business forms, but how those who are socially irresponsible will be punished, reformed, or liquidated.”

Mr. Slim has given money to charity in the past, but could easily be giving to charities that help people find jobs or start their own businesses. He could even create a small business incubator for people in Mexico by pledging even ONE DAY’s earnings from his telecom monopoly.

What do you think?

Is jobs creation the answer?

Is it education?

Or are we all standing outside of a problem that we are not equipped to solve with the information we have now?