elite

The American Enterprise Institute’s new SOURCE tool is a harbinger of lower information costs helpfully altering the relationship between philanthropy and its observers.

During Center for Civil Society podcast, the scholar, author, onetime philanthropy executive, editor, and commentator discusses establishment philanthropy’s elitist progressivism and alternative thinking and examples, as well as the need to balance philanthropic freedom against concerns about philanthropic power.

In the wake of his recent article “Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy,” the economist and policy analyst talks to Michael E. Hartmann about populism and the role of tax-incentivized philanthropy in supporting think tanks, how best to consider reforming the nonprofit sector, and how artificial intelligence might radically reshape it.

Now, in a moment of political backlash and financial scrutiny, those same institutions are asking everyday Americans to stand with them against proposals for increased oversight and higher excise taxes on their endowments. It’s a tough ask. Because the truth is most people haven’t seen that tax-incentivized wealth show up in meaningful ways—not in their neighborhoods, not in their schools, not in their civic life. When Big Philanthropy backed the wrong theory of change and cut itself off from the concerns of working-class Americans, it made a trade-off. And now the cost of that trade is coming due.