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Monday Jun 26, 2006
Buffett's bounty
Fortune magazine journalist Carol J. Loomis didn't quite know what to expect when she arrived to interview billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
We were sitting in a Manhattan living room on a spring afternoon, and Warren Buffett had a Cherry Coke in his hand as usual. But this unremarkable scene was about to take a surprising turn.
"Brace yourself," Buffett warned with a grin. He then described a momentous change in his thinking. Within months, he said, he would begin to give away his Berkshire Hathaway fortune, then and now worth well over $40 billion.
The scale of this donation, which more than doubles the assets of The Gates Foundation, is staggering. Bear in mind that, according to NCVO, the UK voluntary sector as a whole has an income of £26.3 billion.
Interestingly, Buffett's ongoing donation is contingent on one of his friends Bill and Melinda Gates being directly involved in their Foundation.
Some seem confident that the money will be well spent.
...[the Foundation's] hard-headed focus is on the problems that most desperately need cash. Huge funds are raised in the west for heart disease and cancer, but much less for big killers confined to developing countries, such as malaria. Gates money has started to fill the gap, and now funds almost a fifth of polio research. The insight that prevention is better than cure is ruthlessly applied, so the largest grants ($1.5bn) have funded vaccinations that in the end will save more lives than any action to help the sick. Gates is applying a respect for efficiency learned in business to the allocation of his funds. If more philanthropists followed this firmly utilitarian approach, then we would be closer to slaying the global giants of want, ignorance and disease.
And The Economist (subscribers only) argues that: "Capitalism has demonstrated that it is the best system for creating great fortunes. More capitalists should show that it is the best for getting rid of them, too."
However, it has already been suggested elsewhere that Gates's personal qualities make him an unfit philanthropist. No doubt there will be renewed efforts from journalists to try and assess how well his money is being spent.
Posted by Tom Green ( 12:48 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]