NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Here’s a question for the holiday season: If a businessman rakes in a hefty profit while doing good works, is that charity or greed- Do we applaud or hiss?

A new book, “Uncharitable,” seethes with indignation at public expectations that charities be prudent, nonprofit and saintly. The author, Dan Pallotta, argues that those expectations make them less effective, and he has a point.

Mr.Pallotta’s frustration is intertwined with his own history as the inventor of fund-raisers like AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days - events that, he says, netted $305 million over nine years for unrestricted use by charities. In the aid world, that’s a breathtaking sum.

But Mr.Pallotta’s company wasn’t a charity, but rather a for-profit company that created charitable events. Critics railed at his $394,500 salary - low for a corporate chief executive, but stratospheric in the aid world - and at the millions of dollars spent on advertising and marketing and other expenses.

“Shame on Pallotta,”declared one critic at the time, accusing him of“greed and unabashed profiteering.”In the aftermath of a wave of criticism, his company collapsed.

One breast cancer charity that parted ways with Mr.Pallotta began producing its own fund-raising walks, but the net sum raised by those walks for breast cancer research plummeted from $71 million to $11 million, he says.

Mr.Pallotta argues powerfully that the aid world is stunted because groups are discouraged from using such standard business tools as advertising, risktaking, competitive salaries and profits to lure capital.

“We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them,”Mr.Pallotta says.“Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids- Go for it. Want to make a million helping cure kids of cancer- You’re labeled a parasite.”

I confess to ambivalence. I deeply admire the other kind of aid workers, those whose passion for their work is evident by the fact that they’ve gone broke doing it. I’m filled with awe when I go to a place like Darfur and see unpaid or underpaid aid workers in groups like Doctors Without Borders, risking their lives to patch up the victims of genocide.

I also worry that if aid groups paid executives as lavishly as Citigroup, they would be managed as badly as Citigroup.

Yet there’s a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary. It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book.

“Howard Schultz has done more for coffee-growing regions of Africa than anybody I can think of,”Michael Fairbanks, a development expert, said of the chief executive of Starbucks. By helping countries improve their coffee-growing practices and brand their coffees, Starbucks has probably helped impoverished African coffee farmers more than any aid group has.

Mr.Fairbanks himself demonstrates that a businessman can do good even as he does well. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, hired Mr.Fairbanks’s consulting company and paid it millions of dollars between 2000 and 2007.

In turn, Mr.Fairbanks helped Rwanda market its coffee, tea and gorillas. Rwandan coffee now retails for up to $55 a pound in Manhattan, wages in the Rwandan coffee sector have soared up to eight-fold, and zillionaires stumble through the Rwandan jungle to admire the wildlife. President Kagame thanked Mr.Fairbanks by granting him Rwandan citizenship.

In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr.Pallotta may be right that by frowning on aid groups that pay high salaries, advertise extensively and even turn a profit, we end up hurting the world’s neediest.

“People continue to die as a result,”he says bluntly.“This we call morality.”