Can There Be A "Best" Philanthropist?

Barron's came out recently with a list of the 25 best philanthropists. The interesting thing about the list is that they actually ranked people. The blogosphere has had mixed reactions to the list, and it begs the question, can there be a "best" philanthropist?

First, what I liked about Barron's list:

• Serious love for the social entrepreneurship investors. #1 and #2 on the list are eBay fortune's Pierre Omidyar - whose Omidyar Network behaves like a socially-minded venture capital firm - and Jeff Skoll, whose eponymous foundation is one of the leading drivers of social entrepreneurship today.
• There are some entries that don't make headlines but are doing incredible work. Howard G. Buffett's foundation is quietly becoming one of the most important actors in global agriculture and development, for example.
• The idea of ranking based on how much good can be leveraged from each dollar of input is intellectually fascinating

But what I didn't love:

• The list is honestly pretty random. If this was meant to just be provocative and pique curiosity, that would be one thing. But it claims an actually ranking methodology - which somehow puts Brad Pitt ahead of George Soros, for example.
• Whatever the methodology is, we can't even critique that because it's not articulated. This lack of transparency significantly decreases the value of the list as an actual ranking.
• However fascinating it is, the idea of ranking is pretty bunk.

Sean at Tactical Philanthropy writes that the Barron's list "perpetuates the myth of precision." I've been writing about critical voices and nonprofit evaluation for each of the last few days to highlight the fluidity and continuing complication of how to assess impact.

Even as groups like Give Well experiment with better analytics, however, there is still a fundamental problem with trying to rank philanthropy. That problem is that at the end of the day, we have different subjective assessments of which problems are the most important and most dire, and consequently, which social impact is the most important to strive for.

If you believe that governance is at the core of all development challenges in Africa, you may believe that a smaller governance focused philanthropy that doesn't leverage its dollars as well as a major foundation is still a "better" philanthropist because of a believe in the supremacy of the governance issue.

I tend to think that trying to rank issues just creates a bloody race to the bottom in humanitarian marketing in which organizations try to out compete each other for the horror they're trying to address. This is why we've become increasingly inured to photos and videos of starvation and atrocity. It's a bankrupt strategy, and while it's great to see social change getting this sort of media coverage, I think that Barron's list may accidentally perpetuate that sort of mentality.

(Photo: Bill Gates in 1985, from Esparta, Creative Commons)