Ron Lieber has an interesting piece Saturday in “Business Day: Your Money”, “Moved to give but slowed by the Phone”, online titled “One tap giving: extra steps mire online donations”, link here. This sounds like an issue that would get the attention of Michelle Singletary, but I don’t recall a piece on this from her yet.
Apple’s policy is, if you want to collect donations
through the iPhone, you have to use text message and then Safari. It’s a clumsy process on a phone compared to
a normal PC or MacBook, or even maybe a larger iPad. Droid is said to be easier.
Lieber says that Apple would not explain this policy
to him, but it seems to have to do with two main things: protecting consumer privacy, and not wanting
to play umpire with which orgs are most worthy or having to police them.
I do my charitable giving monthly through a more
automated process set up with a bank (Wells Fargo). But that is partly the result of
circumstances surrounding my estate. I
don’t respond to individual appeals often, although I did for Nepal because
Facebook agreed to match. I do change
the recipient amounts as needs increase after disasters – as usually, in my
estimation, the Red Cross or secular children’s charities can make the best use
of the money.
I do get a bit turned off by the idea of “Go Fund Me” (or
campaigns like Ice Bucket) and begging after bad luck. (I talked about this yesterday in another
context.) Shouldn’t people have (flood) insurance or be more careful or make
better choices? At the same time, the
level of risk that most Americans are exposed to is increasing, partly because
of political and social instability associated with inequality (leading to
crime or outright conflict or “expropriation”), possibly because of aggressive
US foreign policy (that is really debatable), and likely because of climate
change, already. There is drought, fire,
and flooding, and it is likely our “collective” behavior is increasing these
perils. Some things, like earthquakes ("San Andreas") and volcanic eruptions, we can’t prevent.
We can turn even more attention to building disaster-resistant homes.
There are construction techniques (still expensive, but they could be automated
more to make them more affordable) to make homes resistant to high-end
hurricanes and tornadoes. Right now, the
reality is that anyone could become homeless or wind up with the “shame” of
living in a shelter.
Still, it’s very hard to say that one charity, or
party or person, is more “deserving” than another, when an appeal is made.
Even libertarian-oriented writers (like Charles Murray
and Jonarthan Rauch) have recently written that we have carried the
hyper-individualistic idea of self-sufficiency too far, to schizoid
levels. We have some competing social
cultures that live in different worlds as to the role of the individual vs. the
extended family and community. “Lotsa Helping Hands” doesn’t seem to apply to
everyone.
Picture: Bat St, Louis, MS, my picture, 2006.
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