Nonprofits are sapping the progressive project

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nonprofits-are-sapping-the-progressive

by paulpauper • 3 years ago

31 21 3 years ago

mgarfias• 3 years ago

Curiously, I came across this today, about the same project in LA: https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/why-the-us-cant-have-...

arp242• 3 years ago

Also discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36014917

astrange• 3 years ago

The project was "released" 2-3 days ago and is being endlessly made fun of on public policy twitter because 1. it's a shade that doesn't provide shade 2. they went on junkets to several different countries that don't do this to "study" them 3. they are incredibly proud of it, to the point of having a press conference with podium on the sidewalk next to it 4. their reaction to complaints is to talk about how it was made "by and for women".

The closest thing to a good reason for this instead of a bus shelter is that ADA rules make it difficult to install bus shelters - they might make the sidewalk too narrow for a wheelchair to move around them. Essentially everything else going on here is bad though; basically, if you wanted to design LA government bureaucracy to maximize people dying in car accidents, you'd come up with what it has now.

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

What you’re looking at is a combination sun shade/lamppost. After traveling to several global cities (on taxpayer money), the good folks at the Kounkuey Design Initiative reached the amazing and counterintuitive conclusion that people waiting for buses need shade during the day and light at night. This would also advance gender equity, they reasoned, since, well, women are in greater danger from lack of light. So for a total cost of $200,000 — including $10,000 for the structure itself, not counting the existing pole it was bolted onto — they developed this innovative structure, “La Sombrita”.
As for why the city didn’t simply install a standard bus shelter combined with a (much more powerful) standard lamppost, the city explained that this would cost over $50,000

Amazing. I have some friends who work diligently at a non-profit that is doing some actual needed work as cost effectively as possible. It's a struggle for them to gather funds and get things done. Watching initiatives like this take $200K of government money and turn it into a nearly useless vanity project for those involved is infuriating.

throwaway33381• 3 years ago

Yep. Nonprofits are broken by design. Sometimes you see egregious forms of corruption like this other times as things grow larger in scale, administrative fees, nice vacations or group events for leadership. Honestly, non-profit status doesn't mean anything. Charities have become an extension of what they originally were just places where people go to make money while "fixing" problems that governments were originally designed to deal with.

How easily problems such as child hunger and homelessness could be solved but the reality is that often it isn't simple, in the US requiring federal initiatives that the current state of our government has enabled this corruption. I don't intend on going political but often it becomes a problem of the commons where people believe they deserve more than others and often you'll see this prop up on forums like this. Where people who make more on average, often due to working in tech, think their opinions on matters are worth more even without the expertise or knowledge to come with it.

That aside, funding for programs is often non-uniform based on what cities actively need to deal with and often the friendships of individuals rather than on any real form of reasoning. We live in a plutocracy and these are just the side effects.

tarboreus• 3 years ago

Nonprofit means the organization does not have equity, not that people don't make money or that executives can't get paid. Nonprofit does mean something, it just happens to be something specific.

jfengel• 3 years ago

As infuriating as it is, I'm not sure that the stupid failures are the reason. Some of the money is always going to be wasted. That's not an excuse for lazy oversight or corruption, but even when those are working well, some things will simply fail.

As much as it sucks to waste $200k, it's a drop in the bucket. American charity giving is close to half a trillion dollars per year. We are awash in so much money that it's counterproductive to think, "Well, if they're just gonna waste some of it, we shouldn't do it at all."

As I said, that's not any kind of comfort. It's right to be infuriated when something could easily have been better. But I've seen too many people insist that avoiding that negative emotion is the absolute top priority, and that causes a lot of suffering.

Gustomaximus• 3 years ago

"The research included junkets to foreign cities to see what works"

While this project is clearly somewhere between incompetent and full blown rort, I feel the bigger issue is privatisation.

To me it seems every beneficial example I see of privatisation of core government services there are endless example of where it goes wrong.

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

Good non-profits are self sustaining from endowments and recurring memberships. Bad non-profits get addicted to the government needle and never lose federal funding. Another classic example is Job Corps, an ancient and totally useless program, or at least so says a friend of mine who works in nonprofits who went on a long rant about it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Corps

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

If I’m being honest, any time I read that something is a gender equity this or that it is fraud. It’s quite clear that this is the modern smoke screen. Interestingly I wonder what would happen if someone guerrilla infrastructured the place. Would the city tear it down in the way it tried to fine the mini library lady in SF?

omginternets2• 3 years ago

What’s this mini library lady in SF thing?

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

It's a classic story. In a city where anything goes, some things don't go, particularly a free little library in front of someone's home: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

For what it's worth, my neighbours up in Glen Park haven't been nabbed by the lawkeepers, flouting the law for years now.

fwlr2• 3 years ago

Might be fighting the tide on this one, I’m afraid.

The basic moral intuition of the progressive world view is that there is good in everyone, we should empower that goodness, and those with the most good in them should be most empowered to make the biggest changes, as that will improve the world the most.*

As long as nonprofits appear to have “more of the good in them” than governments do**, the progressive world view will tend to favour empowering nonprofits over empowering governments.

*: Conversely, the basic moral intuition of the conservative world view is that there is evil in everyone, we should put up guard rails to restrict that evil, and those with the most evil in them should be most restricted, as that will preserve the world the most.

**: You can get a pretty good taxonomy of different progressive views just by looking at how much “good” is thought to be in various powerful entities. For example, the capital-P Progressive might think “nonprofit > government >>> corporation”, the liberal might think “government > nonprofit > corporation”, and the neoliberal might think “government > corporation > nonprofit”. Has Noahpinion been accused of being a neoliberal? Just on the basis of this blog post I would bet he has, since he appears to rate nonprofits lower than government.

clipsy• 3 years ago

You can get a pretty good taxonomy of different progressive views just by looking at how much “good” is thought to be in various powerful entities. For example, the capital-P Progressive might think “nonprofit > government >>> corporation”, the liberal might think “government > nonprofit > corporation”, and the neoliberal might think “government > corporation > nonprofit”.

This is nothing but infantilizing how others think to make yourself feel better. Anyone reasonably intelligent is perfectly aware that there are good and bad examples from each category -- and not only that, but that different problem domains can inherently favor one category over another.

fwlr2• 3 years ago

I’m not really sure how to respond other than to say no, that’s not what I was doing at all. I don’t think progressives, conservatives, liberals, neoliberals, etc., are infantile, I’m not trying to feel like I’m better than any of them. And I really don’t understand your last point at all - a taxonomy obviously contains lots of different things, and grouping them into one broad similarity is never meant to imply they are fully homogenous. Like, it’s obviously a scatterplot and I’m just pointing at some general trends.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of all the money NGOs make as long as there is no solution to the problems of Palestinians.

shrubble• 3 years ago

Many non-profits are there for tax writeoffs, if they help anyone it is a bonus result.

missedthecue• 3 years ago

How does a nonprofit save anyone on tax?

public_defender• 3 years ago

Forgive me if this is addressed later in the article, but I stopped at the paywall.

There is a problem here with perverse incentives. I don't know about this specific project's funding trajectory, but it could arise from (1) The city wanting bus shelters and drawing in unrelated priorities like gender equity, or (2) a city project manager trying to kill two birds with one stone and grant funding to a gender equity project that also advances another city priority. Maybe neither one is happening here, but imagine that the nonprofit ecosystem is saturated with bad decisionmaking and mixed priorities on both axes. This gives rise to a cadre of nonprofits who can pitch any angle to get their project/office funded.

I have personally represented a nonprofit in meetings where a potential donor has added some sort of priority (e.g. "but how will this advance economic mobility?"), and you cannot fail to answer the question if you want to get funded.

In the funding process, you might assume that the donor is checking off a criteria pro forma (and that might even be the original intention). For example there are government donors that require all nonprofits or contractors do some level of gender equity analysis. The problem is that you can't control how you are held to this promise later. Sometimes the government donor is satisfied with the original gender equity analysis, sometimes the political exigencies have changed or the donor's project team has turned over and suddenly you are holding a women's rights press conference at a lamp post.

Here is a cartoon on point: https://nonprofitaf.com/2017/06/imagine-if-apple-had-to-run-...

effingwewt• 3 years ago

Special circle of hell awaits those who let you get 80% through an article to then be hit with a 'subscribe now to continue reading' dialog window.

Great way to make me blacklist the author.

Nonprofits are sapping the progressive project

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