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When the rich give back

Can you ever have too much money?According to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
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Can you ever have too much money?

According to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

The two multi-billionaires are recruiting like-minded American billionaires to pledge at least half of their fortunes to charity. Forty people have agreed to sign the Giving Pledge that requires them to give away at least half their wealth, either now or after their deaths, and to make their intentions public.

Those 40 pledges represent at least $150 billion, according to Forbes magazine estimates.

And Buffett and Gates aren’t done recruiting. Each billionaire they conscript has an opportunity to enact the kind of social change that most of us could only imagine. Forbes says that the United States is home to 403 billionaires, and the movement’s founders want to recruit members from around the world.

Those who sign the pledge are free to donate their money in any fashion they wish, to any cause. The pledge is a moral commitment, not a commitment to fund an existing organization.

It is an instance when the ‘power of money’ is not an ominously loaded phrase.

Certainly Buffett and Gates are no strangers to philanthropic endeavours.

Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, is consistently rated among the richest men in the world. In 2000, he and his wife Melinda created the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s transparent approach allows the benefactors to see how their money is being spent, and ensure it is spent well, focusing on international problems that are often overlooked by others. Among their projects, they have tackled health and poverty issues in the Third World and education shortcomings in the United States.

In addressing each charitable cause, the Gates Foundation has demonstrated the kind of acumen that helped create the family’s riches: they define a social problem and opportunity; develop a strategy and set a budget; establish a grant program that will bring the plan to fruition; measure the results; and take the information gathered and adjust the strategy.

Certainly these are not perfect people, and their strategies have attracted criticism. After a review of its investment strategies in 2007, the Gates Foundation opted to maintain a portfolio for money-in-waiting that focused on profit over good deeds. In some cases, the companies that created profit for the foundation were accused of practices that ran counter to the foundation’s good work.

Buffett’s personal pledge is to give away 99 per cent of his personal wealth. The conduit for his philanthropy is the Gates Foundation.

Until he started giving his cash away in buckets, Buffett was considered the world’s richest man. The market sage makes no apologies for how he accumulated his wealth, but he has said that the market economy, upon which he made his fortune, creates some “lopsided payoffs.”

And so he, like Gates, has become dedicated to evening the accounts.

It is the kind of behaviour that small communities are built upon: neighbours reaching out to others; community groups making certain that the needs of the less fortunate are taken care of.

If the billionaires of the world decide that the human condition is best cared for by creating a global village of philanthropy, so much the better.

John Stewart is the Advocate’s managing editor.