Billions for bumbling

Interview | Big foundations can waste big money, and author Martin Morse Wooster says givers both large and small could use a dose of humility | Marvin Olasky

Tax-paying time brings lots of grumbling about Washington wastefulness, but Martin Morse Wooster reminds us in Great Philanthropic Mistakes (Hudson Institute, 2006) that big foundations have also regularly flopped. Charity bureaucracies can be as bad as governmental ones. Wooster, a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, is also the author of The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of "Donor Intent" and Should Foundations Live Forever?

WORLD: The Ford Foundation in the early 1960s decided to fight poverty and crime by working to create jobs for inner-city youth. What did the foundation leave out of its analysis, and what was the result of the millions of dollars it spent?

WOOSTER: In the late 1950s, Ford program officer Paul Ylvisaker acted on the assumption that if it gave enough money, inner-city activists would create programs that would fight poverty in innovative ways. They were very vague about what they wanted, and for the first two years of the program very little was done because would-be grant recipients had to keep guessing about how they needed to get money from Ford.