Can Buffett's billions solve the world's problems?
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After hard work and soft luck, it takes talent to make money. It takes a certain kind of talent to get rid of it too. Rarely do you find someone who can do both well. The man who has little money knows how to spend it. He buys trifles and gets some pleasure out of it. A man like Warren Buffett, on the other hand, has spent so much time making money, he lacks the time and training to part with it. Often, a man that wealthy pays vast sums to lawyers in order to try to protect his fortune for as long as possible. And then, he starts a foundation.
Recently, Bill Gates announced his retirement from Microsoft; he will devote himself full-time to doing good, he said. Then his friend, Warren Buffett, coincidentally the second richest man in the world, said he was giving $31 billion to the project. And what could anyone say? The papers were universal in their praise of the two men. After all, it was their own money. They offered to ease the suffering of the poor, to cure diseases, to bring technology to bear on the problems of poverty and disease. Here were rich men headed for heaven, said the press reports.
Then, on Wednesday, came a full page ad in the Financial Times, with photos. There was Bill Clinton, looking little different than he did in his high school yearbook. And there were Laura Bush, Jacques Chirac, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair and, of course, Buffett and Gates. All of them had pledged to “identify immediate, practical solutions to the world’s most challenging issues”. But if these people could come up with such solutions, why have they been holding out on us? Couldn’t they spare a day or two for such important work last year?
Whenever we hear about so many of the world’s great and good gathering in one place – in this case the Clinton Global Initiative, a confab organised by the William J. Clinton Foundation – we shudder. What if a giant meteor should strike that very spot? Would all those practical solutions disappear like the mammoths? Or would we merely be spared another high-minded wind-fest?
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Elsewhere in the FT, we discover that “Gates and Clinton link on African health”. And here we pause to draw breath. The two are travelling around the Dark Continent, figuring out how to spend Buffett’s money, brightening it up with health and development programmes. They might as well be Thomas of Aquinas and Mahatma Gandhi installing Christmas lights; smart men, perhaps, but neither has any idea what he is doing.
And what will come of it? If only Buffett had not made so much! A lesser fortune could have been squandered in the usual ways: women, houses, boats, art. Yes, art. Buffett might have acquired the most expensive collection of contemporary art in the world. Then, he could have opened it to the public, who would admire him, thank him – or take him for a fool.
At least the people in whose pockets the money ended up could decide for themselves what to do with it. It is wealth, honestly earned by sweat and saving, that lifts people out of poverty. Acts of grand benevolence, on the other hand, usually make things worse.
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