Not long ago, I crunched some numbers and found that the top 1 percent of U.S. households—who are collectively worth at least $30 trillion—only donated about $130 billion to charity in 2016, which is less than half of 1 percent of their total wealth.

That’s a discouraging statistic in a world where, among other things, millions of children still die every year from preventable causes. But it didn’t surprise me. I can think of myriad examples of insanely rich people who spend lavishly on private jets, multiple estates, over-the-top birthday parties, and more—while leaving little public trace of philanthropic giving.

You don’t hear much about these folks at Inside Philanthropy. We cover those who give, not those who don’t. And if you read my article on the paltry giving of the 1 percent, you’ll notice I didn’t dwell on the penuriousness of any particular billionaire. In fact, we rarely single out anyone for their failure to give. We do often urge existing philanthropists to give more, especially those who’ve signed the Giving Pledge and care about time-urgent issues like climate change. And we often express puzzlement at the timetable top donors have for disposing of their fortunes. For example, I’ve wondered aloud why Bill Gates has $90 billion sitting on the sidelines in private investments—even as he and Melinda publicly urge others to give more, arguing that greater giving can save lives right now.

Overall, though, “philanthro-shaming” is not our thing at IP.

There are several problems with publicly calling out wealthy people who don’t seem to give enough. For starters, it’s easy to be wrong—as we discovered in 2014, when we published a piece on the most and least generous people in tech.

Google co-founder Larry Page was one of the billionaires on our miserly list, but we missed the full story of his giving. It seemed to us that Page was playing a shell game—contributing chunks of wealth to a private family foundation which then evaded payout limits by making gifts to donor-advised funds. There was little public record of Page making many donations to support actual charitable work even as he sheltered hundreds of millions of dollars from taxes.

Read the source article at Inside Philanthropy