The highly popular“buy-one, give-one” models — as epitomized by the popular TOMS Shoes brand— have long held the attention of Western do-gooders. It’s quick, it’s easy,and hey, people like the shoes. Andlet’s not forget the power of the Warm & Fuzzies.

Yet many are beginning to raise concerns about the actual impact of these activities. As Acton’s Michael Matheson Miller recently explainedin an interviewwith Knowledge@Wharton, “The one-for-one model can undermine local producers. When you give free things, why would you buy local shoes?”

In the debut of his new edy show, “Adam Ruins Everything,” Adam Conover chooses to set his sights on precisely this:

To their credit, TOMS Shoes has taken certain steps to reconsider its model, including a decision to “employ 100 Haitians and build a ‘responsible, sustainable’ shoe industry in Haiti.” But alas, by all public appearances, there is still a ways to go.

In addition, it’s worth noting that sucherrors and missteps are not confined to these particular models, or even to for-profit enterprises or detached charities. As Peter Greer explains in the following excerptfrom the PovertyCure series, this type of misaligned charity can occur right in our churches:

For more, see the PovertyCure series.