With Michael E. Hartmann, the former director of special projects at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and current policy fellow at the Ash Center’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation talks about his work and research interests, differences between the billionaire philanthropy of the past and the trillionaire philanthropy of the future, and whether the tensions of each with democracy will also be different.
Jeremy McKey has just become a policy fellow at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, a project of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University‘s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He joins the Allen Lab from Princeton University, where he studied international tech policy.
Previously, McKey was director of special projects at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—for, among other things, he led a $14 million initiative to strengthen American democracy through reforms to political institutions, civil society, and civic culture.
Earlier this year, we noted with interest McKey’s “A New Age of Trillionaire Philanthropy Is Coming. Democracies Should Be Wary,” part of a series of articles in Tech Policy Press about “The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy.”
“Whereas billionaire philanthropy has historically been institutionalist—investing in American civil society and seeding a robust network of scientific and educational institutions—trillionaire philanthropy, when it emerges, may instead embrace an ethos of accelerationism: an ideology that countenances dismantling institutions seen to obstruct a techno-libertarian vision of progress,” he writes in the thoughtful, almost 2,700-word piece. “Democracy may become collateral damage.”
McKey describes, places in historical context, and critiques the accelerationist 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” written by Silicon Valley investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen, who’s decidedly skeptical at best about the results and effects of much recent establishment grantmaking. McKey calls Andreessen’s manifesto “the closest parallel today’s techno-libertarians have to a modern ‘Gospel of Wealth,’” written by Andrew Carnegie in 1889.
McKey was nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. The almost 27-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, after talking about his work and research interests, we address his work and research interests, differences between the billionaire philanthropy of the past and the trillionaire philanthropy of the future, and whether the tensions of each with democracy will also be different.
An old Gospel and a new manifesto
“For Carnegie, philanthropy reflects a life chapter that is distinct from the life chapter of wealth creation,” McKey tells me.
There is kind of embedded in Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth a blueprint for the life of the then-industrialist tycoon that, in simplified form, runs something like this: you spend the first part of your life making a lot of money, doing something that may be valuable for society in some way. …
That wealth-creation activity is temporally and conceptually distinct from what comes after, which is giving back. You make a lot of money, you become very wealthy, and then you have an obligation to do something different from making money, by giving back, a spending-down of your wealth.
That is, on the one hand, an activity that fits into a different life chapter, and the other hand, it’s an activity that calls for different institutional structures. You make your wealth through one particular institutional form, the corporation. You give your wealth back to society through another institutional form, the foundation.
He says that model “really shaped a century of what I’m calling billionaire philanthropy to follow, culminating if you will in the philanthropy of” Bill Gates. “Gates cites Carnegie very approvingly in actually quite a few places, but in particular in the essay he published announcing the spend-down at the Gates Foundation” earlier this year. Gates “cites Carnegie as an inspiration. He endorses this view that it is wholly appropriate for” the very wealthy, “after creating wealth during one life chapter, to spend it down during the next life chapter.”
Andreessen’s view of wealth creation and giving back to society differs from Carnegie’s and Gates’ “basically by denying that there’s a distinction at all between the activity of the entrepreneur in generating wealth and the activity of the philanthropist in giving it back,” according to McKey. “Innovation is inherently philanthropic is the line that really just jumped out at me from Andreessen’s essay. … [O]n his account, if you’re an individual motivated by some sort of loftier societal goals,” the “the way to best pursue those goals is through private-sector entrepreneurship. There’s no distinction, there’s no room in that account for some sort of separate activity that we would call philanthropic.”
New?
Asked whether the Andreessen position is really all that different from that of those conservatives and libertarians who have long promoted and still promote capitalist free enterprise and the market as the best methods to yield the most economic and social benefit, McKey notes important variations in the new, underlying accelerationist argument.
While “similar perhaps to neoliberal antecedents in some respects,” accelerationism is “more extreme in other respects,” he says. First, “it’s a position that views democracy in some way as just, well, bad, to put it simply,” he notes, citing Curtis Yarvin. “This strand of accelerationist thinking feels particularly sort of antithetical to democratic values and ideals.”
Second, while accelerationism “maybe just is an updated account for legitimizing wealth creation,” it’s “in a new technological scenario or situation,” McKey says. “I mean, a lot of this writing is grounded in just the ideas around artificial general intelligence as a general-purpose technology [AGI] that has the potential to completely reshape society again. There’s a very rich and open debate about whether that interpretation of AGI is the correct one,” but accelerationism has
this almost-teleological view of technology, that … we are birthing a new technology, like a new consciousness in a way. And so the goal of facilitating the emergence of this kind of technology supersedes any other small-bore, human, democratic small-d, just like human goal that that we might want to attach to economic activity.
New? (II)
Asked whether that kind of confidence in technological progress might smack of the Carnegie-era Progressives’ reliance on a scientific-technocratic elite to arrive at answers to social problems, he says the question opens “up a kind of much-broader conversation on just how to locate the institution of the foundation within American democracy, or with democracy broadly. And I think you’re raising a very-valid point that foundations themselves, including progressive foundations, are by their nature undemocratic institutions.”
After citing and applying the thinking of Stanford University’s Rob Reich as thoroughly articulated in Reich’s 2018 Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better about how philanthropy’s privileged role in society can be justified by that which it does to advance both pluralism and discovery, McKey notes “it is consistent with any sophisticated account of democracy that undemocratic institutions can have an important role to play in a democratic context.
“I think the justifications that Rob Reich and others put forward” for philanthropy—pluralism and discovery—“I mean, these are values and goals that I think are sort of fundamentally consistent with a democratic value set,” in contrast with Andreessen and accelerationism, which “is not really putting forward a vision that is democratic.”
In the conversation’s second part, McKey discusses the various trade-offs in the relationships with government of legacy foundations and the new institutional vehicles that bigger, trillionaire philanthropists likely will use in the coming years, along with the growing global role of American givers.
