Mark Evans

Our ‘influential reader’ in this edition is Mark Evans, Head of Family Business and Philanthropy at Coutts & Co.He can be contacted at mark.evans@coutts.com

Mark says:

The three books that I have chosen to review throw an interesting light on why people give, but are unlikely to be found on most philanthropists’ bookshelves.

I came across the first book in the waiting room of my local doctor. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, by Marc D. Hauser, challenges the commonly held view that our ‘moral instinct’ is based on experience, education and religion. Instead it argues we have an in-built ‘moral instinct’ that has evolved over millions of years and that experience, education and religion serve to guide it. What is fascinating is the way Hauser uses a series of moral dilemmas to make his point. By way of example, he asks us to compare our response to two different situations. In the first, we are to imagine that we are driving along a country road in a brand new car with white leather seats. We see an injured child covered in blood who looks as though she has been run over. We pick her up and take her to hospital even though it’s going to ruin our leather interior and cost us several hundred dollars to clean. In the second, we receive a letter from a well-known charity asking for $25 to save the lives of 25 children by providing them with oral rehydration salts. All of a sudden, we are forced to stop and think why most of us would feel obliged to help the child on the side of the road, but not the 25 children abroad. Although lots of reasons come to mind, Hauser suggests that it is because until recently in our evolutionary history humans could only help those in their immediate path. “There were no opportunities for altruism at a distance”. So could evolution be the reason why some philanthropists feel motivated by such a strong sense of moral duty?

I was introduced to the second book at the end of a conference organised by the Family Firm Institute in Miami. A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink argues that Western Society is moving from ‘the Information Age’ to ‘the Conceptual Age’ and that right-brained people, such as designers, carers and storytellers, are going to take over the world from left-brained people such as like lawyers, accountants and computer programmers. Pink illustrates his argument by pointing out that many left-brained tasks are being automated or out-sourced to countries in Asia and that online legal services are requiring more lawyers to replace ‘left-brain’ routine work with higher value ‘right-brain’ counselling and mediation. Pink also refers to the ‘backdrop of abundance’ in the West where it is no longer sufficient to offer ‘left-brain’ functionality. Manufacturers also need to pay attention to ‘right-brain’ design: even a toilet brush has to become an ‘object of desire’ to sell. Pink goes on to describe one of the characteristics of right-brained people as empathy, “the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position”. He builds on this thought by explaining how empathy is particularly important for people in developed countries who are spending less time struggling to survive, and more time searching for meaning. He concludes by saying that we are moving from ‘material want’ to ‘meaning want’, which could explain the driving force behind those philanthropists seeking personal fulfilment.

I came across the third book at another conference organised by the Family Firm Institute but this time in San Francisco. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert suggests that what most of us think makes us happy does not make us happy at all. For example, some research suggests we are less happy after we have had children, even though we regard children as a source of happiness. As if this idea is not enough to compel you to read his book, Gilbert also questions the theories of people like Bernoulli, a Dutch polymath, who in 1738 said that “the wisdom of any decision could be calculated by multiplying the probability that the decision will give us what we want by the utility of getting what we want”, where ‘utility’ is something like ‘goodness or pleasure’. In other words, the wisdom of buying a new house requires us to estimate the probability of getting it and how we are going to feel when we get it. One of the reasons that Gilbert dispels Bernoulli’s theory is that it’s not easy to predict how we are going to feel about something before we get it. That said, he does accept the reason that wealth does not make us happy, is because happiness is not about how much wealth we have got, but how much ‘goodness’ our wealth will buy. No wonder philanthropists are increasingly heard to say that they are having more fun giving their money away than making it.