When people have money to burn, they burn it - do what they personally think will help the most, without getting relevant advice. Oprah's heart is in the right place. It's her information deficit that led to an inefficient use of her wealth.
It's a perpetual problem of philanthropy. The people who are in a position to make a real difference don't have a whole lot of clues about what differences need to be made.
Who here doesn't have an "if I win the lottery" idea about what you'd do to make things better? And where did that idea come from? Your own heart, right? Since you haven't won the lottery yet, of course you haven't done any research about whether or how well it would actually work. Well, people who have boatloads of money think that if they're smart enough to get all that money, they're smart enough to figure out how to put it to work. But it's a different flavor of smart, and a fairly rare one, and most rich people don't know much at all about the world outside of their own experience. So huge amounts of money end up going down inefficient holes because the rich people don't know that they don't know everything.
There's nothing wrong with bragging, in my book. If you do something, and present it honestly and in its entirety, there's nothing wrong with putting your name on it. And I like the recent trend for the rich to show off by trying to help the poor. But it's the ones who start with good solid research who actually succeed.
Love, Columbine
