Opinion: Beware Fund Managers’ ‘Big Beast Philanthropy’

With the Ark Gala Ball, one of London’s biggest charity fund raisers, taking place Thursday night, a Guardian columnist argues that the “big beast philanthropy” of the hedge-fund managers behind the event masks the social inequality and financial instability their business fosters.

The annual gala for Ark, or Absolute Return for Kids, a charity established about a decade ago by fund managers, has raised as much as $23-million in a night and also gained a reputation for boorish, boozy behavior by wealthy partygoers.

“I object to high-net-worth philanthropy in principle. It is often presented as a politically neutral act, motivated by pure goodness … yet inequality is a precondition of this kind of lavish spending,” Zoe Williams writes in the U.K. daily.

The cost of such inequality outweighs the amount the Ark gala raises, Ms. Williams says, adding, “The fact that the giving is done so demonstratively, in an atmosphere of celebration, is a tacit rejection of any link between one person’s great wealth and another’s great poverty.”