Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Amy Schiller. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth

College, the Society of Fellow. She also is the author of the new book, The Price of Humanity,

How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It, which Corey Robin correctly calls a magical book.

Amy Schiller, welcome to current affairs. It's such an honor to be here.

Thank you so much.

Well, you are critiquing philanthropy.

You are telling us how we can think about it differently, how we can do philanthropy differently.

Let's start with the critique.

Your second chapter says that giving has become shopping. I would love it if we could

take apart what it means for giving to become shopping. Perfect. No better time to have this

conversation than days before giving Tuesday and the giving season when all of a sudden

the masses begin to really pay attention

in earnest to their charitable giving. And you'll see so many fundraising appeals coming out

and in even a stronger force than they do year around. So giving a shopping is the kind of mass

permeation and understanding of philanthropy as a purchase or an investment

that you're making. So in other words, treating giving as if it's an extension of your other

market transactions. So examples of this include cause branded merchandise, brands like Tom's, brands like red,

the word red in parentheses. And the idea is like, oh, if you buy these products, then you're

actually giving in sort of the bundle of money that you're handing over. Like your giving is

built in because the brand is actually

giving back and redistributing it. So it really makes it convenient for you, the giver slash shopper.

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