[laughing_man]

It doesn't surprise men to find we spend trillions on nonprofits and get little in return. There is an enormous amount of corruption. More than forty years ago I knew a woman who was cold calling people to raise money for research into a canine disease.

If you donated a dollar, she got fifty cents. Her boss got twenty five cents, the company got their cut, the university took a little, so did the department and the professor. By the time it came down to some poor grad student looking at slides there was only a penny or two going to pay him/her. This kind of thing combines the worst of both government and private business.

[rayiner]

Yes, and it’s not just what you’d call outright corruption. A lot of the people who work at non-profits are family members of wealthy people. If you’re a Fortune 500 CEO and your kid isn’t qualified to become a “captain of industry,” you can donate to some non-profit and get them a job there. It’s a socially acceptable way of dealing with “excess elites.” But the consequence of that is that these non-profits aren’t run in a results-driven way. These CEOs aren’t scrutinizing the numbers of the non-profit their nephew works at versus the non-profit some other CEO’s nephew works at, to see who is helping more people more cost effectively. The result is a kind of soft corruption of organizations that get lots of donor funding through social networks but which don’t use that money very effectively. Not because it is being diverted as such, but because nobody is trying very hard.