Individuals of conscience - those who cannot help but care about the condition of others, relative to the comfort they, themselves, are enjoying - are often moved to want to share what they have in excess of their own needs. Simple enough, nevertheless, they're also often perplexed about how best to disburse what it is they want to give away.
Deciding how to give away significant amounts of one thing or another that you have to others who might need that thing, in a way that leaves one satisfied that the highest good has been achieved by that action, can be surprisingly difficult. Will the recipients be made more empowered by the giving, or will they have been made more dependent by the time the initial utility of the gift drops off? Will intermediaries extract more than is fair? Will vital peripheral structures and local exchange systems be undermined, to the eventual detriment of the surrounding community's sustainability? Can I trust those with whom I will be obliged to interact to act honestly and honorably? What conditions or expectations, if any, should attach to the giving? These, and many others, are the questions that complicate the kind of giving that those who aspire to being thought of as philanthropists typically face. For the purposes of this essay, I will refer to that kind of giving as vertical giving - from one much more wealthy to some multiple of others who are very much poorer. Actually, if one were to get really technical about the number and relative wealth of the recipients, you'd probably call it vectoral giving whose degree could be graphically represented. Giving with a relatively high degree of interpersonal connection and mild wealth differential would have a low vectoral gradient, while typical philanthropic giving by the ultra-wealthy to thousands of unknowns in another country, deemed less developed, through a large organization, would have a vectoral gradient pretty close to 90°. Many high-profile organizations dominate the field of charitable giving . A lot of what they take in goes toward highly compelling advertising, solicitation activities and sustained follow-up. Their presence in the public eye is so compelling that the, arguably, greater social value and viability of other options for delivering help - particularly those occurring within a mild vectoral gradient - can easily be overlooked.
This observation is not meant to cast aspersions on the activities of well-established charities. Far from it. There are those that do indispensable work, alleviating hunger, illness and homelessness, both here and abroad. Nevertheless, the overall record of that sector of the social charity establishment is paternalistic, effectively undermining the very reasoning that would lead the recipients to become more self-reliant - the kind that arises when self-empowered people work productively with other self-empowered people to improve the communities they call "home". Even the best of these organizations must, inevitably, run afoul of this, to some degree. In the case of the worst offenders, the only kind of self-empowerment they promulgate is that enjoyed by career professionals looking for politically-correct, long-term financial security. No small number of well-researched investigations have shown that negative social indicators, particularly with respect to relative poverty, remain stubbornly entrenched among population groups most often targeted for such giving. Indeed, in the worst of cases, local self-reliance has been badly undermined by the well-meaning activities of large, top-down-managed, charitable organizations.
Before we rush to judgment on the activities of large charities, however, placing all the blame on them for the persistence of poverty among those they attempt to help, we should pause to consider whether their efforts might have been more fruitful had society not used their entrance into the picture to rationalize cutting back on investment in more traditional forms of social assistance, when these organizations entered the picture to help. The most obvious forms of traditional support I'm referring to include not just those tax-sponsored activities and institutions initiated and run by government but, also, those initiated by ordinary folks, the kind I call lateral assistance - the kind of highly personal, low-vectoral-gradient assistance rendered by people, one-to-one, within the bubble of the private sector. Perhaps it's a simplistic analogy to make but, for a stool to be useful, it needs a minimum of three legs and, in the case of overall giving by society, no leg should be considered as having failed if the other two legs hadn't performed close to as well. When it comes to the sharing of resources, the legs I'm referring to are registered charities, government action and lateral sharing.
What kind of help, specifically, falls within what I consider to be lateral assistance? Basically, any kind of giving where, 1.), the giver and the receiver fall under some kind of umbrella - a family, a friendship, a social club, an organization, a congregation, an ethic identity, a neighborhood or a general income bracket, for instance - that has the effect of conferring upon them the status of equality and, (2.), the giver and the receiver share a bond of reciprocal concern for one another.
Why is this form of help so important to society? Let's go through a shortlist that clearly differentiates lateral assistance from the more vertical types of help offered by governments licensed charities.
*The relatively deeper perception, on the part of the giver, into the complex nature of the potential receiver's life situation, allowing the giver to better assess the needs of that person and then tailor the giving more precisely to the needs of the receiver and, by such means, conserve funds available for providing such assistance
*Such help can be delivered in a timely way
*The delivery of the help is not impeded by an application process that might either intimidate, discourage or disqualify the person needing such help, as might be the case with some organization or government agency
*The potential for reciprocity, at some later date, is inherent to such giving
*The back-and-forth nature of this form of giving creates strong interpersonal bonds, in turn, strengthening society
*There is no lower limit to this form of sharing, as there is with institutional giving and government assistance
*There is no past-record, exclusionary factor that might be attached to the recipient that would completely block him/her from receiving assistance from a benefactor, particularly within the cocoon of a blood- or love relationship
*Such giving constitutes the largest form of help to individuals needing assistance in the buying of a home or the starting of a small business, among other things of social importance
As invaluable as lateral assistance may be, it is not an easy thing for government to create programs designed to promote the existence of it. The biggest tool in the box - that of being able to compel parties to do this or that, if they wish to do one thing or another - is useless. You can't compel people to exhibit the kind of decency that leads one to identify with another's needs, to the point of actually acting to render such help. Does that mean that people in government should just give up on the idea of promoting lateral assistance? I don't think so. There is much benefit that government stands to gain by helping to increase the incidence of lateral assistance within the society it serves. Every person who doesn't need to turn to government for assistance because someone within his peer group came forward with the right amount of help when it was of best use, translates into an incremental benefit for government. Millions and millions of such people helped each year constitute a huge diminution of the demand for public assistance, along with a massive investment in future prospect, across the board.
One idea that comes to mind is made possible by the enormous leap in registering ability afforded the government by huge advances in information technology. The old excuse that charitable giving counts toward tax deductibility only if the source of income from which it springs is greater than some arbitrary cutoff point, simply because the paperwork involved would be too voluminous to extend the same gratitude toward lower earners is no longer valid. If the government were to expect of itself the same kind of rigor, creativity and flexibility found throughout the private sector these days, owing to great advances in IT, it could make deductible any amount of qualifying and properly registered lateral assistance, given to another, unconditionally without ulterior financial designs. Giver and receiver would have to know one another personally. How could such a thing be vetted for honesty? By giving each giver wishing to participate, a monitorable digital account reserved solely for such purpose, from which the recipients, using passwords, could withdraw amounts, at leisure, up to a defined limit. Giver and recipient would have to qualify as peers under whatever qualifying umbrella accords them status as peers.
Another thing government could do is air public service ads promoting the value of lateral giving to society - the sort of advertising of good personal behavior that the state of Utah engages in to such good effect.
Nothing should be done, however, without first undertaking a careful analysis of how much good is currently being delivered by lateral giving and what kind of additional social returns could be had by investing public moneys in expanding rates of such giving.
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