TFA and the actual paper [1] it references are IMO long on insinuation and emotional rhetoric and short on concrete evidence for "elite philanthropy is mainly self-serving". Granted, the title of the actual paper is "Elite philanthropy in the United States and United Kingdom in the new age of inequalities", but it's an argument the paper tries to make anyway.

As far as I can tell, the main criticisms leveled at elite philanthropists are:

1. they mainly support elite institutions

2. they spend money accumulating power to affect policy-making

3. their contribution to nonprofit funding pales in comparison to governments

4. they focus their philanthropic efforts on the developed world

5. they focus their philanthropic efforts on neoliberal causes

1 is sort of a good point. Harvard probably doesn't need another million dollars as much as the donor needs their name on a study room or whatever. But the paper also lumps a lot of stuff into the category of "elite institutions", including donating to big established charities and funding medical research at highly-ranked universities. Maybe those places are technically elite and powerful, but they might also be...good at their jobs? Efficient conduits for achieving the stated goals? Something beyond just being elite things that perpetuate elitism?

2 is also half-valid. I think we can all look at the Koch brothers and say, yup, they definitely wanted to affect American policy. But it's also consistent with wanting to affect meaningful change. The problem for the authors seems to lie in the fact that the change desired by elite philanthropists is fundamentally "neoliberal" (a term disdainfully peppered throughout this piece), and "neoliberal" is taken as synonymous with "self-serving". I'd guess there are plenty of people who are fine with this line of logic, but it seems important to the idea that philanthropy is "self-serving". That assumption is kind of just waved away in the paper.

3 is...yes? Governments do spend more money on nonprofits? This observation is repeatedly highlighted in the paper, but I don't know what the point of it is.

4 is a good point (although, again, the authors lump "funding scientific research at elite institutions" into this category, which seems like a stretch). I'm generally in favor of spending more money on the very poorest people.

5 is a generic criticism that I feel has become more common in the last few years: doing thing x is ultimately bad because it's just some marginal improvement that will entrench wage slavery instead of the revolution that will upend capitalism. I guess it's a thing you can argue, but you can also say it about...anything?

Overall, the paper spends a lot of energy arguing that "elite philanthropy looks a lot like people using their money to acquire social capital", but it marshals frustratingly little concrete evidence that this is actually what elite philanthropists are doing, or that elite philanthropy is unhelpful in any sense beyond having an appearance that can be uncharitably interpreted as self-serving. And this focus on optics is, IMO, lazy -- it conveniently obviates the need to actually dig into what's happening and its consequences, and frees you to just look at the surface and then build your own conclusions -- and not very useful.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijmr.12247?...