Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis. And this week it is actually just me for once. So for the first time in quite a while now, I'm planning on doing a deep dive into a topic, actually something that's quite timely and in the news agenda. This is partly because I'm quite keen to do these sorts of things more often, because I do like to break up the interviews with them. And also, you know, rumors might be circulating around that it's because I actually failed to uh timetable an interview for this uh slot. Uh that's not true. I did have one timetable, but then we had to postpone for various reasons, so I was left with a bit of a gap. Also, uh, just to give you yet another peek behind the uh Wizard's curtain, this is going out at a slightly different time in terms of scheduling. So this should be dropping on the Friday before the Thursday when it would normally be available, just because I am going to be away on leave uh the week that this should be going out. And I don't really want to take my laptop with me and try and publish a podcast. So there you go. Uh a bit of uh behind the scenes magic there. But anyway, so what I'm planning on talking about this week is um the news that's come out recently about the plans by Bill Gates to spend out his fortune um via the Gates Foundation uh more quickly uh than was previously forecast. Um I thought this was an interesting story to take in its own right. You know, it's a big piece of news about philanthropy that's very much kind of broken out into the world of mainstream news and comment. But also I think there is some interesting, kind of wider context around the whole question of the timescales over which philanthropy ideally operates, that I think is worth looking at and you know, the usual dollops of uh history and some quotes from people saying interesting things. Um, and I'm just gonna talk through, I think, a few of my thoughts on that kind of initial announcement by Bill Gates and then some of that wider context. Um, particularly, I should say, in a slightly weird turn of events, uh, because I was relatively quick in putting out some initial very um uh kind of unstructured thoughts via LinkedIn. Uh, I was lucky enough then to have a chance to chat to a journalist, and it meant that some quotes that I gave ended up in the um Associated Press version of the news announcement about Gates. So as a result, I found myself syndicated all over the world. Um, so my sort of current Google news feed keeping track of um what things that I've appeared in in the media is looking very odd indeed, is all kinds of um weird and wonderful small publications from around the world that have picked up that syndication. So if you've read one of those, you might have seen my name uh there alongside that of Bill Gates. Uh, and I think in that story I was essentially saying something along the lines of this is a good thing. It seems like kind of welcome bit of ambition and optimism at a time when that was um sort of sorely lacking, um, both in society as a whole, but also particularly in philanthropy. Um, I guess as a starting point, I kind of broadly stick by that. I do think, you know, this is an announcement that fundamentally should be welcome. So, you know, on paper at least it represents one of the biggest philanthropic commitments in history, although small asterisks uh asterisks there, we all uh not a small asterisk, that would be a small uh cartoon Frenchman, that's a whole different thing. Uh, but a small asterisk to say that actually I think we need to kind of dig into some of the questions about the facts and figures behind the story, which we'll do over the course of this episode. Um, but if you take the announcement at face value, um, as I say, it represents a pretty big philanthropic commitment at a time when you know questions are being asked about philanthropy's role in society and its response to kind of current events and the scale of current challenges. So I think some, you know, uh an announcement of this scale and ambition um is welcome. Um, and also I think the um the optimism that Bill Gates has demonstrated throughout his his life as a as a philanthropist and a humanitarian, um, I think sometimes people take issue with it in that he um perhaps takes a sort of overly optimistic, kind of techno-optimistic view of uh very complex social issues. Again, we'll talk a little bit more about that during the course of the podcast. Um, but actually, from my point of view, as I say, at a time when certainly since the start of the year it's found uh it's been quite difficult to find much, if anything, to be that optimistic about in the world of philanthropy. Actually, somebody going back to sort of saying, I have a belief that I can use my wealth in various different ways to change the world for the better over this period of time, you know, I'm I'm willing to give a reasonable benefit of the doubt to that. Um, so I'm just going to go through a few thoughts first of all about um the my own reaction to this news and also some of the things that other people have said. I guess the first one is what, if anything, indeed, this says about whether there are kind of shifting norms in the world of philanthropy, and particularly in sort of foundation philanthropy, from thinking automatically about much longer-term time horizons, and particularly the the idea of sort of existence in perpetuity for foundations, and that being seen as a default, to these being seen more as ideas that shouldn't be taken for granted and instead need to be kind of scrutinized and challenged. And we've certainly seen in recent years, I think, more emphasis on the idea that people, foundations particularly, should consider shifting towards being limited lifespan or kind of spending down their endowments, or not necessarily doing that, but at least kind of increasing the amount that they're spending on an annual basis as a proportion of their assets. And they're sort of two different but linked debates, as we'll see. Um, but I sort of wonder in that context whether this announcement from Gates is a reflection of some of that, or whether it will have an impact in driving more of it, because you know, this is certainly a very big foundation and a very big philanthropist making a commitment to um doing things on a limited life basis and kind of challenging some of those norms around perpetuity. I I guess this is probably the first point where there's a little bit of necessary grit in the oyster, which is to say, in a sense, this isn't news. Like we knew all along that the Gates Foundation was a limited life foundation. Um actually, all that's changed is the timescales that we're talking about. When they first uh established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as it was then, um it was written into um the sort of organizing principles and articles of it that it would sunset or shut. Um, I think no more than 25 years at that point it was after the death of Bill or Melinda Gates, whichever was later. Um, I think there've been suggestions since then, in fact, um in the last few years that that timescale would move forward significantly. And obviously, with the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates and um Melinda French Gates uh having moved on to do her own work to her own philanthropic vehicle, leaving Bill Gates in charge of the uh the Gates Foundation as it now is, that decision is kind of much more just up to him, and he has decided that he wants to move that timetable significantly forward. And this announcement is really just a kind of confirmation of that. So, in a sense, it's maybe a little bit overblown or a bit of PR to kind of treat this as if it's some sort of new declaration of a donation that wasn't already going to happen. Um, that being said, you know, the timetable has shortened significantly from the original one, and I think, you know, it's important not to be too sniffy about that. Another thing that struck me in this story was the importance of influences in philanthropy. And in making the announcement and kind of explaining the decision, Bill Gates uh cited a number of things as influences on his decision making and on his approach to philanthropy as a whole, I thought were really interesting. So he cited Andrew Carnegie in particular, talked about the The Gospel of Wealth, the famous essay that Carnegie wrote about his sort of views on the responsibilities of wealth and the role that philanthropy uh played in discharging them. Um, and Gates cited in particular Carnegie's famous uh saying that um the man who dies rich dies thus disgraced, um, which you know is his kind of uh outlines his antipathy towards inherited wealth and his sort of belief that it was necessary for people to put their money towards public uses rather than hand it on to heirs. And I think we'll come back to that in a moment. I want to talk quite a bit more about Carnegie uh later on in the podcast. Um, but I think he goes to show that Carnegie continues to be a very big influence on philanthropy today and really has sort of cast a long shadow over philanthropy, if that's not too pejorative a way of putting it, um, for you know a century or more, which is quite remarkable, really. Um another figure that Bill Gates cites quite often in terms of his decision making is Chuck Feeney. Um so Chuck Feeney, who was the duty-free billionaire who uh founded the Atlantic Philanthropies um as a limited life foundation, and did successfully spend down that foundation over the course of a sort of quarter of a century, to the point where, you know, at his death it was said that he had made himself, you know, no longer uh a billionaire. I mean, I think he was probably still relatively wealthy by most people's estimations, but he certainly had given away vast amounts of money. Um, and that example and that kind of idea of uh giving while living that um Feeney espoused as a particular ethos was certainly something that had an impact on Bill Gates and on Warren Buffett and their decision to set up the giving pledge. Um, the the programme that they established where they tried to get uh donors and and families of donors who have uh large amounts of wealth to commit to give away at least 50% of it by the time that they die. And and again, we'll come back to the giving pledge um a little bit further on. Um I also wondered, though, if there were some other influences at play here. I mean, in particular, what I wondered was whether the more recent example of someone like Mackenzie Scott and dare I say Melinda French Gates has had any impact on Bill Gates' thinking about timescales for philanthropy and the sort of urgency of giving. Um, I say that because both Mackenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates um seem to be deliberately challenging this kind of received wisdom that it's difficult to give money away quickly. And certainly in Scott's case, you know, she has given away very large sums of money over a very short period of time and sort of demonstrated um that that is something that's possible. And I wonder if that example has played any part in Gates or in anyone around him, kind of questioning whether in fact his own giving could be done quicker if perhaps it was done in a you know in a slightly different way than had originally been anticipated. Um The other thing that I wondered less in terms of influences, I guess, was whether the timing of this announcement can be read at least in part as a response as a response to the particular moment and the sort of particular urgency of the moment and what's been going on in the US around what the Trump administration has done, the dismantling of USAID, um the kind of mounting uh attacks on civil society and on philanthropy. Um I know when you read Gates' own uh presentation of the decision, he frames it much more in terms of personal factors. So he talks about the fact it's his 70th birthday coming up and the fact that it would have been his father's hundredth birthday and these various things. But there's a sense in which, you know, and I I don't know, I'm not Bill Gates, I have never spoken to Bill Gates, so I don't have any inside track on this. But from the outside at least, there's a it seems as though, you know, the reality is this is a decision that he could have made at any time within, you know, the last five or ten years, really. Um so you've got to wonder whether the actions of the Trump administration and the impact that they're having on civil society has been at least something of a deciding factor in now being the moment to come out and make that decision. And and if so, I guess the interesting question is, you know, is this a defensive move? Is it designed to kind of shore up the Gates Foundation and to deflect potential criticism and attacks from the Trump administration? Or is it designed to sort of put them on the front foot in in light of some of those attacks and to sort of set out their stall, if if not directly a kind of combative move against the Trump administration, at least one to sort of show that they're not planning on being cowed by that and that they are going to continue to kind of strike their own path. Um, so I think you know that's a a really interesting uh set of questions. Um I guess coming back to that idea of influences as well, it's not just the influences on Bill Gates in terms of the decision that he makes, but also what kind of influence will he have on others as a result of having made this decision. Um particularly, I was thinking here again about the giving pledge, which has been around for the best part of a decade now, I think. Um slightly longer, actually. I think it was about 2013 or so. I haven't checked my facts on that, so uh don't email me. Um but I guess there have been certainly in recent years some growing criticisms or kind of quibbles about the giving pledge that even if it is well intentioned and a good idea in theory, it perhaps hasn't lived up to its potential because it particularly because it hasn't really held people who make the pledges accountable for actually kind of following through on them or doing them. So there's no accountability mechanism, as I say, and no real sort of way of measuring whether people are doing what they're doing. And so the you know, the critics would say people get the benefit from writing a letter to set out their plans to do all of this great philanthropy and obviously get the kind of reputational benefit of that, but then don't actually necessarily have to particularly follow through on it. Um, and I think you know, nobody could question uh the fact that Bill Gates himself has always set an example. Um, you know, I don't think you could turn around and say he was a hypocrite in having set up the giving pledge, because he's always kind of um walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But I wonder if part of what he's doing now is that he's setting an even stronger example in terms of putting his money where his mouth is and spending down quicker. And I wonder if that will inspire other giving pledge signatories or indeed, you know, other philanthropists more broadly to do something similar. Um, I know it's something that that Gates again has talked about both in the sort of the essay that he wrote himself on his website to explain this and in an interview in the New York Times, but but in both cases it was more the the sense that he kind of hoped that other wealthy people might follow suit and and kind of engage more in philanthropy and do it bigger and and faster. But I wonder if there's any thinking as well in terms of more proactive steps that Gates is planning on taking to encourage generosity and to get others involved in philanthropy. Um, or I wonder whether he sort of feels like he's done that bit through the giving pledge and either feels as though that's been a success, or if he has any reservations about it, not necessarily quite um, you know, meeting the goals that he set out for it at first, that that the reasons for that and the fact that you know it hasn't necessarily panned out as planned would um uh kind of lead him not to try and do similar things in future, and actually maybe he's kind of realised that there are limits on his own ability to uh to kind of uh corral or to push other wealthy individuals to to give. And I I wonder if that's true, and and if so, is it that there's something fundamental about that kind of pledge philanthropy model? Or is it that you know there's something specific about Gates himself and the fact that he has such a high profile that actually kind of is almost counterproductive in that people look at Gates and say, well, I can't do what Bill Gates does, and I could never do things at that kind of level of scale and commitment, so this probably isn't for me. Or is it that whoever did it, a single initiative of this kind would never be enough? And actually, what's needed is more pledges of kind of a variety of different kinds that reflect different cultural backgrounds, so maybe ones from different countries and regions, or maybe sort of different donor types or different approaches, and that actually we need more of a sort of plurality of initiatives designed to try and drive philanthropy. I'm not sure. I mean, my suspicion is that it's more the latter, and that you know, there's no sense in kind of giving up on these things, because I think trying to drive cultures of philanthropy, um, you know, most of the evidence suggests that norms of various kinds and peer group effects are very important, and so you know, there's probably a lot more mileage in exploring different ways of doing that. But I I also wanted to uh consider some of the criticisms, or if not criticism, questions that have been raised about the story since it came out, because I think there are some some still some things that that kind of we could justifiably ask about it, and some things that remain unknown or unknowable at this point, but will be relevant in future. So I think one is whether the the maths in in this announcement actually stacks up. And particularly, I think there was a really good article from Michael Cavate in um Inside Philanthropy, basically kind of outlining some of this and doing some of the sums. The the main problem is that sort of Gates's promise that the foundation's going to disappear by 2045 actually seems quite incompatible with the specific figures that have been put out so far in terms of how much money overall that will involve and what it will involve in terms of annual spending. I mean, as Cavate points out, the figures that we've had seem to be that, you know, this will involve giving away uh $200 billion over the next 20 years, which is you know undoubtedly a large amount of money. Um, at least in some reporting I saw, there was I thought I saw a suggestion that was 200 billion of additional dollars on top of what was potentially already being spent. So it's possible there's something in in that that's um that's getting missed here. But I think also subsequently, you know, Gates himself has referred to that 200 billion figure as if it was the overall figure. So perhaps that's that's the confusion, I don't know. But if so, and and also in terms of uh annual spending, I think when that's been mentioned, they've talked about increasing their annual grant spending to around sort of nine or ten billion um dollars a year. But the the point that Cavati makes is that because the the money in the endowment is obviously going to be generating financial returns, as uh foundation endowments do, even if it's badly invested and not generating very much, which isn't currently the case, it's probably still going to be ticking over at a at a percentage in terms of returns that means you could spend that amount of money, certainly every year, and still not actually even touch any of the principal, you know, the main pot of money in the endowment. So I guess there's an interesting question about what's going on here. I mean, are is Gates and are the Gates Foundation just being kind of over-cautious in terms of how they're presenting this and they don't want to kind of overclaim. So actually they're erring very, very much on the side of caution. Do they just have their sums wrong somewhere? I mean, I find that unlikely. There's lots of very smart people involved, Bill Gates uh himself being one of them, but also many people who work at the Gates Foundation. So I think it's it's unlikely that they've just made a weird error and and couldn't calculate the amounts that that would be required to make this plan work. Yeah, or is there something else going on here that we don't yet know in terms of how they're actually planning on going about implementing this desire to spend down the foundation over the next um 20 years? For instance, are they, you know, do these plans actually involve reducing their for-profit investment or shifting some or all of their investments into kind of mission-aligned things that might reduce signific that might produce significantly lower investment returns and they're kind of factoring that in? I think that's potentially something that could happen. And I know certainly in terms of other, you know, admittedly much smaller foundations that have successfully spent down, a large part of it often is shifting their investments in that way and sort of seeing that as part of using their overall um pool of assets. I guess the flip side is that if, you know, unless you you just took that money and turned it into a Essentially grant funding and got no return whatsoever, which would, I suspect, legally be very difficult. You're still making investments. And even if they are potentially sort of very high risk financial investments, or ones where you are trading off a very large element of the financial return for a sort of a social return, you're still going to get some financial return. So, you know, you you will have a smaller version of that same problem that we already outlined about the money continuing to grow. And, you know, what if the investments are really successful? Which is a potentially real problem. So in Gates' case, for instance, if the Gates Foundation were going to shift its investments into things that were mission-dealigned, I would expect that to go into investments in things like medical technology or AI and the applications of AI in education and other areas in which Bill Gates has been very interested over recent years. And the chances are some of those will actually pay off enormously. So they probably would end up making quite a lot of money in it, whilst, you know, ostensibly being driven largely by the desire to kind of achieve their mission. And I just sort of wonder whether this demonstrates that, you know, in terms of this goal of spending now and overall, there's there is actually a kind of Brewster's millions problem here that when you've got that much money, it's quite hard to get rid of it because it just keeps generating more in returns. I suppose the other option is to do something else with their endowment, which is not to shift the way that in which they invest it, but to actually just give away the endowment. So again, don't uh invest it, get returns out of it, and then grant out those returns. Just hand over management of large chunks of the endowment to other organizations. And this is something, it's not commonplace, but it has happened before in philanthropy, and it's it's an area of interest, I think, particularly in the context of debates and discussions around sort of shifting power within philanthropy, where, again, for people who think, you know, there's something in the model of endowed foundations uh having assets and then only kind of making gifts out of the investment returns on their principal, that embodies sort of problematic power imbalances and asymmetries. And that actually one thing that the foundations could do if they genuinely mean, you know, that they want to be more justice focused or to kind of acknowledge these imbalances of power is to hand over the control over the endowment uh assets themselves to, you know, often this is to kind of uh historically marginalized groups or to groups that represent the communities on the ground that the foundation is trying to help. And it is possible, I suppose, that um, you know, the Gates Foundation will decide to do this and might do it at enormous scale. I mean, that's very speculative on my part at the moment. I don't know, you know, I have no kind of inside track in knowing that that is even something they're thinking about. But I think it will be really interesting to watch that space and to see what happens. Just in terms of a couple of other thoughts on the announcement, um, one is that I thought it was interesting that Gates' framing of why he'd taken the decision was still very much uh in terms of the idea of solving problems. And I wonder if, you know, there's always a sense in which that that is ambitious and that's maybe a good thing, but there's also the flip side, which is that it can seem kind of hubristic and give the idea that the you know the goal of philanthropy is to solve very complex, you know, social problems. And the danger is that that kind of oversimplifies them and and reduces them down to to things that can be easily solved by particular interventions or by particular kind of you know um uh technological tools, for instance. Um and here's a really great quote um that I uh like to come back to from the um an Anglican newspaper called The Guardian, not that Guardian, but a different um from 1891, writing about this where it says it cannot be too strongly asserted that there is no heroic solution of the social problem in any degree possible. Indeed, the very expression social problem, where it's not merely rhetorical, is to be deprecated, for it for it encourages in the public mind that radical misconception of the subject matter of religion and philanthropy, which thinks of it, speaks of it, and proposes to deal with it as something simple, measurable and defined, a rotten limb which may be amputated, not a subtle poison diffused through the whole body. There is no social problem, but there is an infinitely complex network of social relationships existing under abnormal and perplexing conditions, and deriving from them elements of special danger and difficulty. Heroic remedies ignore the character of the disease which they pretend to cure. They are naturally confined to social quacks, whose ignorance may be honest, but is always profound, and whose confidence is invariably absolute. Any scheme or project which proposes a solution of the entire social problem is self-condemned. So obviously there it's specifically related to the idea of the kind of the overall social problem, but I think the point you know reads across to philanthropy as a whole, which is when you're trying to address big challenges and big problems, if you sort of position your goals as solving them, uh sometimes maybe that's not actually as helpful as all of that. And I do wonder, you know, in with relation to what I was saying earlier about, you know, the um the precedent and example that's been set by somebody like Mackenzie Scott, actually, in terms of this being the way in which you think about philanthropy, I think it still positions it very much in terms of thinking about set goals and being kind of strategic in trying to achieve against them on the part of the funder. And I wonder if that makes it harder in some sense to give quickly because you are beholden to those goals. And it's easier for a donor like Mackenzie Scott, for instance, to give very quickly because she takes a different view of what the purpose of her philanthropy is, which is, you know, not that she's not interested in having an impact and, you know, does all of the work up front to sort of um do the due diligence in order to decide which organizations to give to. But then when she does give, for a large bulk of her giving, it's been in the form of um unrestricted grants to organizations to continue the work that they're already doing. And actually, in some sense, the the impact is at the point of donation. You know, that that is the point. The point of the philanthropy is to empower the organizations that you're giving to, not in a sense to kind of use them as a mechanism to deliver your own, you know, wider goals that you've already set for yourself. And I think in some sense, it's kind of easier, therefore, to give quicker because at the point of having made the donation, you have achieved your goal. Whereas I think for Gates, framing things in terms of trying to solve these three challenges that he's outlined maybe makes things more uh challenging for him. And then uh the other two thoughts that I had were one, that maybe there is a sense in which existing criticisms about the outsize influence that the Gates Foundation has and the way in which it can be um sort of anti-democratic might be exacerbated by these ambitions of increasing the scale and pace of spending. So that you know, there are already people who would point out that um any philanthropy of the scale of Gates' is going to have a distorting effect on public spending and public policy, even when it's very well intentioned, just because of the fact that the scale of what it's doing means that it can exert a sort of genuine and meaningful influence, particularly in contexts, you know, in sort of countries in the global south, where the kinds of money that an organization like the Gates Foundation is able to bring to bear actually are comparable to the amounts of money that governments are spending on things. And so if they come in with their own set of priorities as a funder, that can then kind of divert activity to towards um all of that and other sort of funding and public policy will follow suit. And again, as I say, not that they're necessarily wrong in what they've chosen to do, and not that their intentions are in any way questionable along the line, but just that in doing that there is a kind of unintended consequence and they are not democratically accountable in the way that a government would be. And I wonder if you know the need now to give bigger and faster will potentially kind of um exacerbate some of these concerns. I also wonder, just additional to that, whether if if, as we've said, if the pace of that spending dictates that it's necessary to use approaches beyond grant giving, so whether that's um, you know, for-profit investment of some kind or investing in startup businesses increasingly, whether that will also exacerbate another tendency, which is to sort of put emphasis on technological or commercial solutions in fields like climate or in healthcare, which is another thing that some have been critical of Gates for over the years. And you know, I think it's very noticeable these days that Gates talks a lot about the the potential of AI as a solution in fields such as education. So I would expect him to be investing quite heavily in that as an area, and that is certainly something that you know many would view critically. And then the the final thought just on the announcement before we go into some of the kind of historical background is I think there's something about how you plan for your own demise as a foundation and what you're what responsibility you bear uh for what comes afterwards. Um and I'm thinking here, you know, going back to Chuck Feeney, the example of the Atlantic flant peas and the work it did, particularly in Ireland, I think is really interesting. Because, you know, it was known from the outset that this foundation was going to be limited life and it would cease to exist af after a set period of time. And yet, still, my understanding is from that Irish context that when it did eventually shut its doors and the funding uh stopped, it still left a big gap in that philanthropy ecosystem, simply by the virtue of the fact that it had been such a major funder in there. And again, you know, I suspect something similar will be true of the Gates Foundation. I don't suspect it's quite, you know, it's not quite as big in relation to the overall field of funding that it uh is involved is as the Atlantic Philanthropies was in Ireland, where it genuinely was the biggest funder by quite a long way. But it is also an enormous funder, both, you know, in a US uh sense, but uh at a global scale. And in many particular countries, it's a very significant funder. So that question of, well, what happens when it's not around anymore is, I think, a very pertinent one. And so I'll be really interested to see as we hear more about this decision and how it's going to play out, you know, what the Gates Foundation is thinking in terms of how it mitigates that risk and what you know, what responsibility it feels it bears to leave the overall philanthropy landscape in a better place than it found it and what that entails. You know, it might be, again, as we were saying before, if part of the plan is to hand over management of their endowment to other organizations so that you know then they're not essentially spending out in a true sense, but but kind of handing over power to other organizations. Maybe some of those concerns will be slightly less acute, but I still think there are you know genuine uh kind of issues that need to be thought through here. Okay, so um in this section, I want to step back a little bit or maybe outwards and take a bit of a look at the wider question of timescales in philanthropy and how some of the questions and the issues thrown up by this recent announcement from Bill Gates uh relate to kind of the history of philanthropy and uh some of the other perspectives on it. So I guess the first question is you know, we've sort of said already that perhaps there has been this norm of longevity or even kind of perpetuity, particularly in foundation philanthropy. And, you know, why is that? Um, well, I guess, you know, we did a whole episode a while back, which I'll put links in the show notes to about the history of philanthropic foundations, and we discussed in that the fact that their origin story is very much tied into thinking about death and legacy. So the idea of a bequest or a foundation as an uh independent organization or legal structure that was able to exist after the donor's lifetime and to kind of continue their wishes into the future was a crucial part of why these things emerged, actually, in sort of multiple different parts of the world, potentially independently. There's a kind of intuitive logic to this, or they kind of meet a particular demand, and that demand is for legacy and status and a way of sort of securing one's uh reputation over the longer term beyond your own lifetime. Um, so foundations are kind of inherently linked to bequests or gifts on death and really to the idea of perpetuity. There's also an element here that is about shifts in religious teaching or the relationship of religious teaching to charity and thinking about philanthropy. Um, so for in very, very broad brush terms, so the focus certainly within Christianity in the medieval period amongst Catholics was on the idea of charity as a means to secure the donor's immortal soul and thereby kind of ensure their passage to heaven. So it made quite a lot of sense to start thinking about it, or to, you know, the mind was very much focused at the point at which you were to die, and that wasn't too late, as long as you kind of left a big bequest when you died, that that would be seen as sufficient. Also, more practically, or even you know, more cynically, most of those bequests at that point ended up with the church one way or another. So you might well think that they had a preference for handily dead donors rather than uh irritatingly live ones. And then we have the Reformation, and the the impact of the Reformation on philanthropy is complicated and relatively contested, but certainly one thing that is clear is that there was a longer-term shift that was started by the emergence of Protestantism towards the idea that charity was a means of doing good in the world during your lifetime and that you should do acts of philanthropy in your lifetime in order to serve God, rather than just focusing on doing them at death. So there was more focus as a result on the idea that giving whilst living was was something desirable. So, for instance, in the late 1600s, you've got the Puritan preacher Thomas Gataker saying, good done at our end is like a lantern born after us that directeth them that come after us, but afford us little light, whereas the good done in our lifetime is like a light born before us that both benefit them and us also alike. Now, we obviously shouldn't pretend that everybody suddenly started giving whilst still alive, because that very much wasn't the code the case. Bequests remained a very big part of philanthropy even after the Reformation, um, and they still do today. It's also worth saying that there's been some suggestions sort of in the write-ups of this that the idea of foundation perpetuity is something that kind of emerged with the birth of modern philanthropy in the late 19th, early 20th century in the US, which is you know a very US-centric view of philanthropy. And I hope as I've conveyed there, it's not actually true. Um the idea of kind of perpetual endowments pre-exists that that US history by quite a long way. I guess what is worth saying is that at the point at which the great big foundations of the late ninth, the sort of early 20th century were created in the US, they were unprecedented in the sense that these kind of huge general purpose um foundations with with perpetual lives were not something that had been seen before in the UK or Europe. And actually they kind of came out of nowhere. Again, we talked about this on the episode about foundations, but you know, up till that point it hadn't been possible to create these sort of trust-like structures um because there had been uh you know, for various reasons, a lot of resistance to it in the US. And yet, for some reason, suddenly they managed to create these. I mean, make that sound easier than it was, they had to fight very hard to get the Rockefeller Foundation created, and there was a lot of resistance to it. But once that resistance had been overcome and the precedent had been set, all of a sudden this new template for philanthropy, huge scale general purpose foundations had been established and it, you know, has remained kind of the template ever since that. But because this idea of perpetuity has been around for a lot longer than that, also concerns about it and arguments against it have been around for a lot longer than that as well. And I think it's kind of interesting to think about some of that history. So, in terms of some of the arguments that have been levelled against the idea of longevity in philanthropy and particularly against kind of outright perpetuity, the biggest one is the idea of the dead hand of the donor as a problem. So, this is the idea that by having perpetual institutions where an individual can set their desires and goals in concrete and have them uh kind of extended beyond their own lifestyle, they're able to reach up essentially kind of out of the grave and exert an undue influence on future generations. And this is an idea that's been around for quite a long time. So perhaps the earliest clear version of it's in the late uh eighteenth century, um, when the the French economist and writer and Robert Jacques Turgo, um, he wrote um uh an essay called Fondation, and he said, Public utility is the supreme law, it must not be tempered by a superstitious respect for the so-called intentions of the founders, as if individuals, ignorant and limited as they are, have the right to subject unborn generations to their caprice. Let us conclude that no work of man is made for eternity, and since foundations, continually multiplied by vanity, would ultimately absorb all wealth and private property, we must be able to destroy them. And these criticisms were taken on by other writers sort of throughout the nineteenth century, particularly. Um in the UK there was a man called Sir Arthur Hobhouse, who was a kind of a reformer of various kinds, um, but also very interested in issues around charity, and he was particularly concerned about these questions of the dead hand of the donor as sort of uh typified by endowed organization. Um he said, To me it seems the most extravagant of propositions to say that because a man has been fortunate enough to enjoy a large share of this world's goods in this life, he shall therefore, and for no other cause, when he must quit this life and can enjoy his goods no longer, be entitled to speak from his grave forever and dictate forever to living men how that portion of the earth's produce shall be spent. Now, in particular, Hobhouse's ire was kind of sparked by a problem in uh London in the mid-19th century where all of these little sort of parochial trusts that had been established, so by donors on their deathbed setting up um endowed uh trusts with in many cases very sort of narrow and specific criteria for what they were supposed to do and how, it had got to the point where many of those trusts were so narrow and so specific in focus that it wasn't possible to spend the money anymore. And so there was kind of all of this money tied up in these little pools of kind of um endowments that could no longer essentially be put to any use. And Hobhouse and other reformers thought this was outrageous. So he kind of campaigned very hard against this and eventually was successful. And this is part of the creation story of the charity commission in the UK, which was sort of given new powers in order to crack open some of those parochial trusts and to pull them all together into one fund and to spend the money appropriately. And Hobhouse's example, I think, um was was known at the time, but also was sort of picked up by many later um people who were concerned about similar issues. So William Beveridge, for instance, one of the architects of the welfare state in the UK, uh wrote a book called Voluntary Action in 1948, and in that he very sort of approvingly cites um Hobhouse's work uh as well. Um it's also uh interesting to note that the history of community foundations um was influenced by similar thinking. So uh Frederick Goff, who established the Cleveland Fund, um, which was is generally agreed to be the earliest community foundation, the sort of template, he was writing in 1922, or it's a speech he gave, I think, that was then written up, but it's entitled The Dead Hand, and he opens by saying community foundations aim to provide a flexible plan for administering charitable trusts. They are designed to lessen the evil of the dead hand by making property dedicated to a specific charitable purpose available for other uses when the one designated by the donor becomes harmful or obsolete. And also there were examples where concerns about the dead hand. Dead hand of the donor were very clearly leveled at some of the sort of famous names of philanthropy as well. So there's a 1910 news article I came across, for instance, which is talking about the proposals for this new Rockefeller Foundation, which at that time they were still trying to get approved and couldn't. And this article says, you know, imagine the proposed Rockefeller Foundation solidly buttressed by $300 million, only the income of which could be used, dominating in this style the numerous beneficiaries of its benevolence during the next five hundred years. Can we doubt that such a domination would be exercised? If we do, then we are childlike indeed. The power of the purse, let us not underestimate it. Just as the enormous influence of the monasteries in the Middle Ages was based largely upon inalienable property and its usufruct, so these private incorporated foundations, living forever, would attain an influence anti social and anti democratic to an extraordinary degree, which, you know, is quite prescient, I'd say, in terms of subsequent uh criticisms of foundations and perpetuity in particular. It should be said that even sort of relatively soon after this template was established in the US, there were plenty, well, I say plenty, there were certainly some donors who were quite clear that they didn't believe in perpetuity. So Julius Rosemal, for instance, the Jewish donor who was the CEO of Sears and Roebuck, and a really fascinating philanthropist, he wrote an essay called Principles of Public Giving, and in that he says, I'm certain that those who seek by perpetuities to create for themselves a kind of immortality on earth will fail, if only because no institution and no foundation can live forever. If some men are remembered years and centuries after the death of the last of their contemporaries, it is not because of endowments they created. The names of Harvard, Yale, Bodley, and Smithson, to be sure, are still on men's lips, but the names are now not of those men, but of institutions. Um to sort of making the distinction there that actually by trying to buy immortality for yourself, you don't really do that because actually you kind of transfer your name over to an institution, then it's the institution that lives uh on in perpetuity. Um, which will bring us at the end of the podcast to something interesting that I think Carnegie said about this. But then it one and a quote I love on this is from uh George Eastman, who was one of the founders of the Eastman Kodak photography and camera company. Um and he famously said, Men who leave their money to be distributed by others are pie-faced mutts. So he had a foundation, as did Rosenwald, and in both cases they were limited life foundations. And there were other examples as well towards the sort of early 20th century. So Charles Garland, uh, for instance, who founded the American Fund for Public Service, all of these were set up deliberately as limited life uh foundations rather than perpetual ones and existed sort of for about the period of 20 years and did some amazing work in many cases. I guess the thing is they've they they were in a small minority, so you don't want to overplay the level of uh of importance they had, and often they they tend to be partially forgotten because those foundations no longer exist and haven't done for a long time. So unless you're historically minded, you might never have heard of them. I think in in terms of other arguments that are made against taking a long-term view, apart from concerns about the dead hand of the donor, the other one that's that's very relevant at this moment in time is that actually it's driven more by the fact that there is particular urgency to the current moment, so that the arguments for spending more and spending quicker are very compelling, and that the arguments for uh keeping the money over the longer term in the form of an endowment are you know are not as compelling. So I think the fact that, you know, as lots of people argue, we're in the midst of this poly crisis where you know all sort of different factors, economic, climate, um, health scares and pandemics, you know, threats to democracy, all these sorts of things, that this demands a uniquely large-scale and rapid response. And as a result, you know, foundations and donors should be spending more and spending more quickly. In some cases, for instance, with the climate crisis, the argument might be that actually we're at an inflection point, so that if we don't take significantly more action now, the problem is that the damage will be so severe that it won't be possible to address it in the future. So they're kind of trying to make this case that incrementalism is not actually a choice with respect to some of these things. It's not about uh sort of choosing to move faster or slower. If you move slower, actually you run the risk that you won't have the option of acting at a later date. I think you know there is a strong case for that, certainly when it comes to um an issue like climate, where we're talking about complex systems and there are potential tipping points that then can then lead on to very rapid sort of escalation of issues. I guess the other challenge though is that there's always this sort of presentist fallacy, which is it's easy at the particular moment you happen to be at in time to think that the challenges that you face are uniquely difficult or you know unprecedented. And often it's difficult to step outside of that without the benefit of sort of future hindsight and and to see how this fits into a longer-term cycle, which is not to say that I'm sort of saying, oh, actually we shouldn't be concerned about these issues. It might well be that we are at an unprecedented moment in history for various reasons, but it's it's sort of difficult to know that. I think the the other thing um at the moment that is posing some of a challenge for this idea that we need to focus on the urgency of the current moment is that there is this increasing tendency for some donors, particularly from a tech background, to focus on the sort of ultra-long term and to think about problems that will occur on the scale of hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and to sort of present their philanthropy in these terms. And for some people, you know, whilst they kind of acknowledge that there is something important in allowing philanthropy to go after unpopular causes or to sort of think ahead about what might be coming next and to act as society's risk capital, this leads to a focus on slightly sort of odd choices. Um and uh it comes at the cost of addressing problems in the here and now. Because I think that's the thing. In isolation, allowing you know a certain number of philanthropists to kind of you know chase after odd causes is not problematic. In fact, it's probably quite a healthy thing. But if lots and lots of them do it at scale and that becomes a sort of big part of philanthropy, that maybe is an issue. And also if the opportunity cost is significant in terms of things not getting funded now, then that's also a problem. I sometimes wonder whether the issue is that there are too many tech philanthropists who've read Isaac Asimov's foundation series and sort of desperately want to win the prize for being the one who takes the longest-term view of things and establishes an institution that then exists thousands of years into the future and shapes human history. And God, if Elon Musk is listening to this, that I'm not suggesting that as a game plan, please, you know, don't take that away and certainly don't quote me. There's an interesting point here, I think as well, a sort of related argument against taking a long-term view, which um is that there's a certain amount of humility required to acknowledge that we we can't know the future. And I think Andrew Carnegie's really interesting on this, because he wrote an essay called The Problems of Today, uh, in which he says our duty of today is with today's problems, we have nothing to do with those of the distant future. We cannot legislate wisely for posterity. It's sad indeed to see able and good men who could aid in improving the present expending their talents upon a new system for a distant future of which they can know nothing, which reads to me something like a criticism of long termism. Um and he also says, The man is not born who can legislate wisely for a future which has not been revealed to him, and of which therefore he can know nothing. Sufficient unto our own day are the evils thereof. These we should endeavour to abolish or mitigate, leaving the future to our successors. Um I mean it's worth saying Carnegie was mostly arguing against socialism and communism specifically here. That's the kind of subtext. Um but still I think you know the criticism that he's making um do read across more broadly. So I think there are various arguments that have been made and can be made against focusing on the very long-term infilanthropy and allowing institutions to exist certainly in perpetuity. But also, I guess, you know, it's not just that these things happen to be a default and you know, we therefore things exist in perpetuity, and otherwise there would be absolutely no purpose to it. There are also clear kind of positive cases to be made for allowing institutions to exist over the long term, even if, you know, in many cases that's not necessarily why they were set up like that. It's just because that happened to be the default norm. But I think you can make a strong case, particularly now, that at a time when political and market cycles have become shorter and shorter, the ability of philanthropy to take a longer term view of issues arguably has more value than it ever has before. I think also, you know, when you set against that the arguments we've already talked about about the sort of particular urgency of the current moment, I think even if those are true and compelling and should lead us to consider whether more should be spent now or whether we should uh sort of spend partially down on endowments, I think the the sort of the alternative of well, you should spend all of the money now seems to um imply that you can solve the problems that you're trying to address. But I think the the reality is, well, unless you're vastly optimistic or think that there's going to be some deeply fundamental change in human society that hasn't occurred over the last however many thousand years, that's going to mean that there is suddenly no inequality and no poverty and no ill health and all these other things. The reality is there's likely to be plenty of need uh in 10 or 20 years' time, and so there will also be a need for philanthropy. And if you you know theoretically or hypothetically spent out all of the philanthropy money now, would you have the resources required? Obviously, what you need to assume is that there will be more resources in the future, and this is something you know Bill Gates said in his interview with the New York Times is that even once he spends down, you know, the the hope or expectation is that there will be other philanthropy that will come and sort of fill in those gaps. But but it's hard not to think that if you lost all of that existing philanthropic funding now, that would pose some quite significant um challenges. I think Carnegie's really interesting again on this question of the the value of taking a long-term view. Um, you know, we've just said before that actually was very critical of the idea of people and philanthropists sort of thinking ahead about the problems of the future. Um, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that he believed in spending down or disagreed with perpetuity. You know, actually, as he said in another thing that he wrote, he said, poor and restricted are our opportunities in this life, narrow our horizon, our best work, most imperfect. But rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage and thus dignify their own lives. And how did he square this apparent circle? Well, what see what he did was he focused on the idea that he and other donors like him should give during their own lifetimes, but that didn't necessarily mean that the money then had to be entirely dissipated. It was perfectly legitimate to create institutions that could then exist over the longer term, and that indeed is what he did in many cases with those Carnegie institutions. But crucially, as part of that, he made it his business to sort of ensure that power was given to the future leaders of those institutions then to determine how best to respond to the changing needs of their own time rather than him sort of dictating. So a lot of the Carnegie institutions, if you look at the um ways in which they were set up, they have very kind of broad governing principles that allow them an enormous amount of flexibility to evolve over time. Um and this is certainly something I was struck by. I've just relatively recently been involved in um an organization, an event that brought together all of the um Carnegie institutions of various kinds from the UK and the US and elsewhere to discuss various issues. And this question of you know this value of longevity was, you know, was really interesting given that in the room were many organizations that were the reflection of this longevity and of sort of Carnegie's original vision. So I'm definitely convinced that this can be made to work and can have real benefit. Of course, you know, there is always still the argument that institutions can become ossified or sort of small c conservative, and also that founders can cast a shadow over them, even when they don't intend to or want to, because people sometimes make decisions with reference to what they think the donor would have wanted. I think this was certainly true in the early days of some of the Carnegie institutions, like the Carnegie Corporation, and this is something I way back on the podcast I discussed with uh Maribel Maury and her work on looking at um the Carnegie Corporation and its funding of Gunnar Mierdal's an American Dilemma um project. And it was very clear in that that the people running the Carnegie Corporation at the time made a lot of reference to what Andrew Carnegie would have wanted, and whether that was a sort of genuine reflection or was a way of them sort of uh justifying their own desires and their own priorities is less clear. Um but it's certainly true that even though Carnegie was no longer around at that point, his uh his legacy and his vision still have played a very big part in sort of shaping those institutions, and that is likely to be the case for others where there is a you know sort of prominent and dominant founder. And maybe over time that dissipates and it's sort of easier to evolve whilst you know still referencing the original founder's vision or to reject that vision altogether, who knows? Um, but I do think it's a kind of interesting challenge uh to this idea of perpetuity. So I guess where does that all leave us? In in as far as I can draw a conclusion from this, I think there are strong theoretical arguments in favour of the value of taking a long-term view in philanthropy, but there's also, I think, a clear danger that those kinds of theoretical arguments can become an excuse for just not spending very much and maintaining an endowment for its own sake. And I think it's also very hard to say with any certainty from within the present moment where where the difference lies between a sort of sensible long-term vision that will pay off in the future and what's just foot dragging. So if you are taking a more incremental approach, if that pays off because you actually do stuff over sort of 20, 30, 40 years, obviously we won't know that until 20, 30, 40 years time. And it might turn out that actually it has very little impact and you were just doing things unnecessarily slowly, and you would have been better off spending that money much quicker or straight away at the beginning. But it's again, without the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult sometimes to know these things. You know, the flip side is that clearly there is an argument or a series of arguments for spending more and more quickly in response to the particular challenges we face at the moment. Um and it certainly seems in the US at the moment that a number of foundations have accepted those arguments, because there certainly do seem to be quite a few that are increasing their spending in response to the challenges that have been created by the attacks from the Trump administration and the withdrawal of government funding. And even before that, I think organizations that for sort of wider reasons of concerns about justice and inequality and structural um problems within society had decided either to spend more or to take a decision to spend down. I think it's worth saying on those two, spend more, spend down. Sometimes those arguments about spending down are conflated with ones about just sort of payout rates and spending more. Um, and I do think whilst they sit on a spectrum, it's important to not assume that they're the same thing, because it's perfectly possible for foundations to spend more, probably quite a lot more, each year without necessarily assuming that they should spend themselves out of existence. So I think this question of the legitimacy of perpetual endowments needs to be slightly separated from the question of payout rates, even though they are clearly related. Well, that brings us to the end of some slightly rambling thoughts about uh the Gates Foundation's uh recent announcement and the sort of wider context for some of the issues that it raises. Um I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can read plenty more about that. If you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. 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