4 ms·

This has to be the least rigorous essay that I’ve read in a while. Somehow it manages to claim it’s taking on the huge issue of “do non-profits drive social ch

This has to be the least rigorous essay that I’ve read in a while. Somehow it manages to claim it’s taking on the huge issue of “do non-profits drive social change” while also: - never citing a single piece of data or quoting any experts. - proposing three unrelated “ideas” without even trying to make the claim that the three are the holistic. - never mentioning the impact of non-profits in the developing world, or on the lower income folks in the developed world. - never mentioning a successful social movement, or even defining what “social change” is. - for some reason conflating “elite status” with social change. - assuming that any non-profits have him as a target population (rich professor at a university) in the first place. I honestly felt embarrassed for the author (and the editors that okayed this) while reading this essay. I don’t think this should be on the front page. —— Edit: I looked up what “Comment” was, since I hadn’t heard of the publication before. This is how they describe themselves: > Comment is one of the core publications of Cardus, a think tank devoted to renewing North American social architecture, rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought.

jeffbee 4y ago
I think this guy wanted to grind his axe on the topic of the corrupt non-profit industrial complex, but tried to bury it in a different essay and it didn’t work. That’s too bad because the NPIC exists and is corrupted and you are allowed to write about it (see: SF Standard’s recent article about TODCO).
photochemsyn 4y ago
The author seems to be pointing out that the difference between 'for-profit' and 'non-profit' is not quite as clear as one might expect, and that the popular notion that 'non-profit' implies some selfless, virtuous, do-gooder agenda is not well-supported. As far as data, the fact that religious US non-profits have yearly revenues on the order of $400 billion a year is included, although the article could have included the total size of the US non-profit economy (~$2.5 trillion). (I imagine religious non-profits in the Islamic world are at least as large). Your comment seems to be pushing back against this arguably cynical view of the motivations of non-profits and other 'workers for good'. It is a discussion worth having, so calling for it to be removed is, well, sort of supporting the thesis if you follow.

jeffbee 4y ago

I think this guy wanted to grind his axe on the topic of the corrupt non-profit industrial complex, but tried to bury it in a different essay and it didn’t work. That’s too bad because the NPIC exists and is corrupted and you are allowed to write about it (see: SF Standard’s recent article about TODCO).

photochemsyn 4y ago

The author seems to be pointing out that the difference between 'for-profit' and 'non-profit' is not quite as clear as one might expect, and that the popular notion that 'non-profit' implies some selfless, virtuous, do-gooder agenda is not well-supported. As far as data, the fact that religious US non-profits have yearly revenues on the order of $400 billion a year is included, although the article could have included the total size of the US non-profit economy (~$2.5 trillion). (I imagine religious non-profits in the Islamic world are at least as large). Your comment seems to be pushing back against this arguably cynical view of the motivations of non-profits and other 'workers for good'. It is a discussion worth having, so calling for it to be removed is, well, sort of supporting the thesis if you follow.