What will Bill Gates think when he is 75? How will he look back at his philanthropic efforts and the challenges he had to overcome? Matthew Bishop from the Economist presents a compelling view of the world in 2030.
It is October 25th 2030. Bill Gates is celebrating his 75th birthday, still in excellent health in his eighth decade, like his father before him. Nowadays, nobody gives much thought to the fact that Gates once ran Microsoft, a firm that had made something called software for long forgotten gadgets called personal computers, and was bought a decade earlier by a 17-year-old entrepreneur from Vietnam. Instead, the headlines proclaim that the “Leader of the philanthropy revolution turns 75”.
By giving away the bulk of his own fortune, an estimated $100 billion, plus the $30 billion handed to him by his much missed friend Warren Buffett, Gates has saved millions of lives and improved the quality of life for many more than that. He has also inspired many of the world’s growing army of billionaires – 3,500 of them in 2030, according to the latest Forbes list – to join him in giving away much of their money to tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity. And not just the billionaires: in a renaissance of civil society, a mass-affluent version of Gates’s brand of “intelligent philanthropy” has become a normal part of life for millions at the wealthier end of the world’s increasingly prosperous population.
It hasn’t been easy. Gates, like most of the new philanthropists that have followed in his footsteps, was always determined to go about his philanthropy in a businesslike way, using the same skills and techniques to give money away that had helped him to make it in the first place. But, as Buffett had often reminded him, giving money away is a “tougher game” than making it. In business, you go for the low hanging fruit, the easy wins; in philanthropy, you go after the hardest, most complicated problems – the ones nobody else has managed to solve. And in business you can measure how well you are doing by watching your profits pile up – or not. In philanthropy, particularly the big, world-changing sort that Gates is into, there is no simple measure of success.
And despite all his billions, the resources available to Gates were always dwarfed by those available to governments or big business. Though from the start he understood the need to do this, it took Gates a while to learn how to leverage his money through partnering successfully with governments and business, as well as non-governmental organizations. At first he underestimated the importance of achieving systemic change by influencing politics, rather than simply delivering better technological fixes such as new drugs or model schools – though eventually he figured it out.
The years after he left his day job at Microsoft, in June 2008, to go full time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, were especially tough. Expectations were at an all-time high, compared to which progress seemed slow. Where was the malaria vaccine, or the other wonder drugs promised to save millions of lives in poorer countries, who were relying on money from Gates to provide drug firms with the incentive to innovate that their own meager finances did not?
Drug development takes a long time. A few promising drugs failed in late stage trials – and, even worse, one that made it through the trials was reported to have unforeseen side-effects, causing anti-Gates riots in three African countries. Happily, showing the natural rapid reaction of a businessman to a product problem, Gates reassured the public by withdrawing the drug fast, and the side-effects proved to be trivial. Still, Gates was to remain a lighting rod for popular protests in Africa until about 2020, when the supply of new drugs had soared and the evidence of lives saved was so clear that local politicians no longer saw votes in blaming the American billionaire for interfering in their health care systems. Besides, as his and others’ giving to promote development grew, so did their economies.
One problem was that for Gates, being businesslike meant taking risks, which also meant plenty of failures – at times so many that even he started to harbour secret doubts that his best efforts would be good enough. Drug development proved easier than persuading countries to change their health care systems to deliver those drugs effectively, let alone creating sustainable jobs in the world’s more dysfunctional economies. And Gates was determined to be transparent about his failures, as well as his successes, so that others could learn from them – which provided his critics with plenty of ammunition.
And the criticisms grew as the number of philanthropists increased. It seems hard to believe now, but by 2015 rising inequality had become the hottest political issue everywhere from America to Zaire. Many a populist politician preferred to attack billionaire plutocrats, and argue for them to be taxed out of their riches, than to acknowledge that they had a useful, indeed unique, role to play in solving big problems. This only started to ebb as Gates and others started to demonstrate that they could do things that governments, firms and NGOs could not – mobilizing large amounts of money fast to address risky issues in innovative ways, free from the constraints imposed by needing to get re-elected, or delivering higher quarterly earnings or raising funds from supporters.
It was his growing evidence that philanthropy could achieve success, as much as his generosity per se, that convinced many of the new billionaires that he was onto something. They liked the fact that philanthropy clearly made Gates happier, but what they really needed to know was that they could make a difference. As his track record grew more impressive, so did the ranks willing to try it themselves. Many of them were the billionaires created in the emerging parts of the world where the social challenges were greatest, or at least most visible. They set about tackling education, health care, water scarcity and climate change in such innovative ways that, lately, Gates has started to use some of his giving to transfer technology from the developing world to America – something that seemed inconceivable when he started his philanthropy in the mid-1990s.
As more lives have been saved, Gates and other philanthropists have turned their attention increasingly to creating jobs for the millions of unexpected survivors. Here there has been a new fusion of philanthropy with the profit motive, as donated dollars have been deployed to invent business models that generate sufficient profit to raise in private markets the sort of capital necessary to grow to massive scale. Again, after an initial outcry against the “for-profit philanthropy” – “Who do they think they are fooling?” asked more than one politician – it became clear that the philanthropists really were giving the money away, but achieving greater impact by doing it this way. More recently, the success of philanthropists in fighting climate change by developing new affordable clean technologies has done wonders for their reputations – even if this innovation was driven as much by profit-seeking investment as giving.
But, above all, the gradual emergence of a new “social contract” between the super rich and the rest of society has also helped ease tensions. Encouraged by over-burdened governments that are increasingly aware that they need all the help they can get, the public has become comfortable with the proliferation of billionaires, and their growing role in tackling big social problems. What it means to be a good billionaire has become generally agreed. Today it is widely accepted by billionaires around the world that to be respectable, they must have earned their money without exploitation – shame about those Russian oligarchs, still desperately courting social approval by buying soccer teams - and that they are expected to give significantly, transparently and in ways that acknowledge their accountability to the public. Do that, and they will be largely free of criticism – or at least from the treat of punitive taxation. They may win election to one of the much sought after philanthropist seats on the board of one of the new global multilateral institutions (many of them seed-financed by philanthropists) that have proliferated in recent years to address the need for global responses to the big challenges to society. They may even be admired, as Gates now is.
Lord Bono – taking time out from U2’s “Old Boy” Tour, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the band’s first album – entertains the birthday party-goers with a hip-hop version of “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” “I have”, Gates thinks, as he raises a glass of champagne. He has big news to announce. Next year, the success of the philanthropy revolution will be marked by celebrating the eradication of malaria from the planet.
Matthew Bishop
Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum
New York Bureau Chief, The Economist, USA
