What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality.

[Proserpina]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can-buy-profiles-larissa-macfarquhar

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it. Some try to raise money, but that can be depressing and futile. Others try to make money, but it’s hard to make enough. There is a third, more reliable way to overcome this obstacle, however, and that is to give away money that has already been made by somebody else, and has already been allocated to world-changing purposes. This is the way of the grant-makers of the Ford Foundation.

Ford’s grant-makers are employed “for the general purpose of advancing human welfare,” so their work requires determining what human welfare consists of and how best to advance it. This being no simple matter, they spend a great deal of time on it and frequently revise their conclusions. Of course, even with money, changing the world is difficult. The grant-makers know that many of their ideas will not work, and that even those which do will only go so far, because of all the other obstacles. Still, compared to others with similar ambitions, they possess a rare and heady blend of power and freedom: they are beholden to no one, neither consumers nor shareholders nor clients nor donors nor voters, and they have half a billion dollars each year to spend on whatever they like.

“Good morning, Ford Foundation, and Happy New Year!” Darren Walker cried, to loud applause. “How great it is to be at the Ford Foundation on January 6th and doing the work we do!”

Walker, the foundation’s tenth president, who took over in 2013, stood on a stage in the Ford Foundation building, on East Forty-third Street, in New York City, but his beaming face also appeared on screens thousands of miles away, in Ford offices throughout the world: in Mexico City and Rio and Santiago; in Cairo and Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg; in Delhi, Beijing, and Jakarta. The auditorium in which he stood was a relic of Ford’s past, still furnished with chocolate tufted-leather seats from 1967, with sliding brass ashtrays under the armrests. To the right of the stage was written a series of words that described Ford’s hoped-for future: Justice, Opportunity, Voice, Dignity, Creativity, Change, Visionaries. Walker himself was beloved for his democratic exuberance, manifested both in his vivacious clothing (his jaunty ties, his pocket squares, his pig cufflinks) and in his untiring enthusiasm.

“There is a lot going on at the Ford Foundation,” he declared. “So fasten your seat belts!”

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