Giving Compass' Take:

• In this op-ed for TIME magazine, Winners Take All author Anand Giridharadas takes a critical look at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' recent commitment to homelessness and early education.

• Giridharadas' thoughts are that Bezos would do better to treat his workers better (and pay them more), while addressing systemic flaws that create inequality. Is he correct? Is this an example of an elite philanthropist meaning well, but perpetuating a power imbalance that created that person's enormous wealth in the first place?

• Click here to read more on Giridharadas' recent book and his views on self-interested altruism.

“Where’s the good in the world, and how can we spread it?”

This was the question anchoring the approach that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, laid out last week in announcing his and his wife’s entrance into mega-philanthropy: a $2 billion gift to address homelessness and education. The Bezoses want to fund capable organizations serving the homeless on the ground and to build a network of private, full-scholarship Montessori-like schools for poor children, who will supposedly be treated like customers are at Amazon, where the Bezoses amassed their $100 billion-plus fortune.

As soon as I saw that question in their announcement, I knew that yet another highly original, daring magnate had succumbed to the clichés and tragic limitations of American billionaire giving.

The question about spreading what is good reeked of an approach borrowed from the business world — where things are pilot-tested and scaled. That approach can be worrisome when applied to social problems. It is generous to want to grow what’s good. But that smiley-faced, can-do, focus-on-the-bright-side, entrepreneurial, solutionist orientation is often accompanied by a willful blindness toward systems, root causes and the distribution of power. Many of America’s most urgent social problems are not the result of good spreading too slowly, but rather of harms being perpetrated: employers exploiting workers to fatten their bottom lines; plutocrats using their political clout to secure tax policies that benefit them at most people’s expense; the affluent clinging to zoning and education policies that hoard opportunity rather than spread it.

Read the full article about analyzing Jeff Bezos' philanthropy by Anand Giridharadas at time.com.