What's in it for them?
In the old days, one of the perks of being a major-league philanthropist was the satisfaction of having a statue erected in your honour. Take George Peabody, the 19th-century American merchant who moved to Britain and developed a penchant for building social housing all over London. Like his Peabody estates, he is still with us today; his seated figure was allotted a prime piece of real estate opposite what was until recently the site of the London Stock Exchange in Threadneedle Street, prompting his biographer to remark that he occupied "the most costly chair in the British Empire".
Thus did mere businessmen enter the ranks of great leaders, warriors, philosophers and poets, achieving immortality in an effigy.
There was, however, a downside to philanthropy. Wherever it flourished, an undercurrent of scepticism was never far away. What, people asked, drove men who had spent their lives making money, often ruthlessly, to give it all away in such apparently selfless acts of altruism and generosity?
The wits were usually ready with an answer. The English poet Nicholas Breton (1545-1626) defined philanthropy as "to fish for honour with a silver hook". John Gay (1685-1732), the English playwright, remarked: "The luxury of doing good surpasses every other personal enjoyment." Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the French novelist, said: "Every good deed is more than three parts pride." In his Devil's Dictionary, the American satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) defined a philanthropist as: "A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket."
Admittedly, no statues have been erected yet to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, the richest and second richest men in the world, for their enormous pledges to charity - probably the biggest acts of philanthropy in history.
But something else is missing, too: the scepticism. It would seem that either a lull in really extravagant acts of philanthropy has left us forgetful of how to respond to them, or that the amounts pledged by Gates and Buffett are so stupendously large as to pre-empt even gentle questioning.
Therefore, in a spirit of meanness, rancour, cynicism and misanthropy, let us revive an old tradition by wondering if there is sometimes a little more to philanthropy than compassion and benevolence.
To recap briefly on the Gates and Buffett pledges: in June, Buffett pledged to donate about $37bn of his fortune in Berkshire Hathaway stock to charity, with $31bn of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Thanks to Gates' own contributions, the Gates foundation was already by far the biggest in the US with an endowment of more than $29bn, and a couple of weeks earlier Gates had announced that he would more or less retire from Microsoft in 2008 to spend more time on his charitable work.
Perhaps the first thing any cynic will note about these pledges is that they are devoid of any self-sacrifice. Gates and Buffett are only handing over surplus wealth, meaning that part of it for which they have no other use; and they are not even donating all of that.
According to Forbes magazine's latest billionaires list, Gates remains by far the richest man in the world with a unimaginable fortune of $50bn even after his donations; and Buffett, with what the media called his "extraordinary gift of altruism" and "jaw-dropping generosity", is to give away only 85 per cent of his estimated $44bn for the time being, leaving him with loose change of $6.6bn.
To that extent, a poor man who shares his crust with a starving friend is surely a greater altruist than either billionaire.
Meanwhile, Buffett has been lauded for his lack of vanity in handing his money over to the Gates foundation instead of setting up a charitable trust in his own name. But the effect of that decision is to leave him a relatively passive investor, although he has a seat on the foundation's board.
Gates, however, is actively involved in the work of his foundation, and will become even more so after he steps back from his role at Microsoft. Yet, like most philanthropists, he has been unable to resist the temptation to immortalise himself, if not in a statue, then in the name of the foundation he created.
We might also note that the notion of charity sits oddly with the careers of both men. For Buffett, aged 76, the act of charitable giving has come late in a life so far given over almost entirely to the accumulation of immense wealth. Gates, as chairman and former chief executive of a company widely perceived as a pitiless corporate bully, must be as surprised as any of us to find himself suddenly in possession of a social conscience.
Finally, it is of course marvellous that these men have pledged so much money to good causes. But what else could they have done with it? As the old truism has it, you can't take it with you. It was far in excess of any sum they could ever have sensibly spent. And neither of them wanted to pass on vast fortunes to their children because they felt unearned gains of that size robbed people's lives of purpose.
So if it was not pure altruism that motivated the philanthropy of Buffett and Gates, what was it? Was it a case of fishing for honour with Breton's silver hook, or indulging in Gay's luxury surpassing every other personal enjoyment? Or was Flaubert right in pointing to pride, or Bierce in identifying conscience?
If only there were a simple answer. It is hard enough to say with confidence what hidden impulses trigger our own apparently altruistic acts - guilt, perhaps, or a sense of duty towards humanity, or a vague, superstitious belief that what goes around comes around - without trying to divine precisely what combinations of subconscious thoughts lie behind the actions of others.
Still, there is another possible reason why the very rich engage in large-scale acts of philanthropy, and one that becomes clearer with a glance back at history.
Right now, says Paul Schervish, director of the Centre on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, Massachusetts, we are entering a golden age of philanthropy, thanks to the growing ranks of the super-wealthy. In the past 20 years, according to Forbes, the number of billionaires worldwide has shot up from 140 to 793, and Schervish says that, at least in the US, "the higher the value of the estate, the higher the proportion of it that goes to charity".
But this is not the first such golden age. For that, you have to go back to 16th-century England when rich merchants and landowners set out on a campaign to extinguish poverty in the realm, more or less inventing modern philanthropy in the process.
Before then, in the Middle Ages, charitable giving was mainly a religious affair. The pious made donations to the church and the church gave alms to the poor, usually quite indiscriminately in the sense that most of the giving was to beggars without much knowledge of their circumstances.
After the Reformation, however, as England passed from the Middle Ages into the modern era, an agrarian revolution was under way. The age of feudalism, when families tilled the soil for a living, was being brought to an end by the enclosure of land for sheep farming, which required little labour. The production of wool, in turn, gave rise to England's early industrialisation; but although new jobs were being created in the textile mills and in the growing towns, the depopulation of the countryside resulted in appalling homelessness, poverty and hunger.
In his book Philanthropy in England 1480-1660, long out of print, the late W.K. Jordan, a Harvard University history professor, documented how these forces resulted in a paradox. On the one hand, these were prosperous times in which merchants and landowners grew immensely rich, but on the other, vast numbers of people were condemned to a poverty such as they had never before known. "This ever-spreading gulf between classes troubled the whole society and was a principal factor in evoking the great charitable outpouring which characterised the age," Jordan wrote.
As the 1600s approached, the suffering in England was so widespread as to raise real fears of insurrection. Under Queen Elizabeth I, parliament reacted to the threat of disorder by passing legislation for the relief of the poor and by promulgating the Charitable Uses Act of 1601, the legal framework for establishing secular charitable trusts.
In fact poor relief, which would have empowered magistrates to levy taxes on local parishes, was only ever intended as a last resort should private charity prove inadequate. It was eventually rendered unnecessary by a vast outpouring of wealth from the merchants and landowners, who used the new charitable trust mechanism not just to wage war on poverty but also to found grammar schools and hospitals and set up endowments for the improvement of their communities.
As Jordan put it: "An historical decision of very great moment was perhaps unwittingly taken by private donors of all classes, but most importantly, those of the merchant elite, which initiated not only the fashioning of social institutions for the nation but also the fashioning of an ethic of social responsibility which was to be the hallmark of the liberal society."
The circumstances that prompted that first golden age of philanthropy found echoes in the second: the one that took place in the latter part of the 19th century. Once again, society was in the grip of drastic social and economic change, resulting this time from the industrial revolution. Once again a vast gulf opened up between those harvesting great fortunes from technological change and those suffering grinding poverty in the rapidly expanding cities. And once again the wealthy, often very religious in private but humanitarian in their public aims, embarked on an epic campaign to alleviate deprivation.
The difference was, this time they failed. Towards the end of the Victorian era, it became increasingly evident that the uncoordinated actions of thousands of individual charities and trusts were simply not up to the job of tackling the immense social problems of an urbanised, industrial society. Amid the growing social discontent of the late century, the Victorians began to realise that the primary responsibility for public welfare would have to pass to the state.
This goes some way to explaining why philanthropy went into decline for much of the 20th century. As the welfare state started to provide old-age pensions, universal education, free healthcare and unemployment benefits, there was less need for charity.
This was also a time when the gulf between rich and poor narrowed. The poor grew richer thanks to state benefits while the rich grew poorer because of the tax increases necessary to pay for them. Wars, inflation, recessions and bear markets also eroded the concentration of wealth at the top.
In the US, philanthropy also experienced a golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as so-called robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller made vast fortunes from industrialisation. But the US, too, saw a remarkable narrowing of the wealth gap during much of the 20th century as the nation leaned, at least temporarily, towards social democracy - for example introducing higher taxes, social insurance and the minimum wage.
To illustrate how far taxation now substitutes for philanthropy even in the US, which is usually perceived as lacking a European-style welfare state, the US estimates it will be paying out $539bn this year in social security - old-age pensions and benefits for the widowed and disabled. That means that, if the entirety of Bill Gates' $50bn, the largest private fortune the world has ever seen, were applied to financing the nation's social security budget, it would run out in just over a month.
So why, if welfare statism is still with us on such a scale, are we now entering a third golden age of philanthropy? The answer is: for much the same reasons as we entered the first and second. As then, we are again in the grip of a revolution, or possibly two: a technological revolution accompanied by globalisation. As then, immense fortunes have been made from the opportunities thrown up by change. And as then, we find the gulf between rich and poor widening - only this time not so much between rich and poor in the US or UK, although that is certainly happening, but between the multibillionaires of the west and the extremely poor elsewhere.
A pattern, therefore, emerges. A social and economic revolution occurs; some people make enormous fortunes from it; the gulf between rich and poor grows to the point where it becomes as great as society can bear; and the newly rich defuse the crisis by surrendering some or all of their wealth.
Seen in that light, philanthropy could be said to act as a safety valve or even a form of social control: a mechanism adopted by the rich (if only subconsciously) to maintain the existing order at times of great change and extremes of inequality. And, if the threat of insurrection seems more far-fetched today than it did in 1601, it is not completely absent: witness, for example, the size and violence of the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist riots that took place around the world as the wealth-creating stock market boom of the late 1990s reached its peak.
Finally, then, we have identified what could, at least from the cynic's point of view, be the secret ingredient of rich people's philanthropy: self-preservation. Certainly there will be other motives in the mix, both noble and ignoble. But the lesson of history appears to be that when change produces a wealth gap too wide for society to tolerate, either the rich must get poorer or the poor must get richer, and philanthropy becomes a means of narrowing the divide.
The problem is that, this time, not all billionaires can be trusted to do their bit for social responsibility. In the past golden ages of philanthropy, exhortation from the pulpit, if nothing else, reminded the very wealthy of their duty towards the poor; self-preservation was at stake not just in this world, but in the next one. Now, however, enlightened self-interest is more the prevailing ethic.
Richard D. North, author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence, expresses the thinking. "I'm not terribly worried whether people are miserly or hand their wealth on to their children or give it away because I have a profound faith that it all gets spread around anyway. If they leave their money in a bank, the bank is going to use it and off it goes to be reinvested, and so on," he says.
What if today's growing ranks of billionaires take the same view? Will the wealth gap just keep widening as they hoard their wealth instead of sharing it? Or will other forces intervene to narrow the divide, as they did in the 20th century?
Perhaps rather than waiting to see, society should be admonishing the very rich in the way the pulpit once did. That would mean a bit less fawning adulation for Gates and Buffett and a bit more old-fashioned scepticism. But it would mean something a lot stronger for the billionaires who keep their money to themselves. We should be treating them as pariahs, subjecting them at every opportunity to withering scorn.
After all, as the Australian-born philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer points out, if there is one question more interesting than what motivates those billionaires who give their fortunes to philanthropy, it is what motivates those who do not. How do they justify not doing anything when their wealth could make so much difference to the lives of so many people?
"Whether they give or don't give, they're making a life-or-death decision," Singer says. "I don't think that omitting to give in any sense relieves you of the responsibility for not having done something to assist at least some of the 1.2bn people living in poverty, as the World Bank defines it."
In the 16th century, Jordan records in his history of philanthropy, a noted Puritan divine named Edward Dering consistently opposed the poor laws of Elizabethan England on the grounds that they tended to weaken the moral responsibility that wealth must bear for poverty and need. Men, he said, were made rich for no other reason than that they might give to the poor.
According to Dering, this responsibility was direct, was personal, and must not be vitiated by an effort to spread it over a whole polity, Jordan wrote. "If men of substance declined to assume their moral duty by the voluntary support of their needy brethren, the poor should be assigned to them in direct proportion to their wealth."
That is not a bad idea at all. Let's see now, with 1.2bn poor people in the world, and 793 people on the Forbes billionaires list, that would mean assigning just over 1.5m poor people to the average billionaire. Perhaps a threat of that order might restore in the super-rich that "ethic of social responsibility" we once dared hope had become "the hallmark of the liberal society".
富人为何要行善？(中)
可
能还有另一个原因促使巨富们大规模参与慈善活动，回顾一下历史，这个原因就会更为明显。
美国马萨诸塞州波士顿学院(Boston College)财富和慈善中心主任保罗?舍维什(Paul Schervish)表示，如今，由于超极富豪的数量不断增加，我们正进入一个慈善活动黄金时期。《福布斯》的数据显示，过去20年，全球亿万富翁的数量从140位激增至793位，而舍维什表示，至少在美国，“财产价值越高，其流向慈善组织的比例也越高。”
但这并非第一个慈善活动黄金时期。早在16世纪的英格兰，富商和地主便发起过消灭贫困的运动。在一定程度上，正是这一运动开创了现代的慈善事业。
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在这之前的中世纪，慈善捐赠主要是一种宗教行为。虔诚的信徒将钱物捐赠给教堂，而教堂则为穷人提供救济，这种救济通常不带有太大的歧视性，多数捐赠行为都是在不太了解乞讨者境况的情况下进行的。
但在宗教改革(Reformation)之后，英国从中世纪进入现代社会，农业革命开始。在封建社会，家庭都以农耕为生，但为了牧羊而发生的圈地运动终结了封建时代，因为养羊只需要很少的劳动力。接下来，羊毛生产活动带来了英国早期的工业化，然而，尽管纺织厂和不断发展的城镇创造了新的就业机会，农业人口减少的结果却是数量惊人的无家可归者，以及随之而来的贫困和饥饿。
已故哈佛大学历史学教授W.K.乔丹(W.K. Jordan)曾编有《1480年至1660年英格兰慈善史》(Philanthropy in England 1480-1660)一书，这部著作早已绝版，它记录了社会发展导致的一个矛盾现象：一方面，那是一个繁荣时期，商人和地主成为了巨富；另一方面，许多人陷入了前所未有的贫困。乔丹写道：“贫富阶层的差距不断扩大，令整个社会不安，这也是引发大量慈善捐款的一个重要因素，而大量慈善捐款成为了那个时代的特征。”
随着17世纪的到来，贫困潦倒的穷人在英国已是随处可见，终于引发人们对起义的真实恐惧。在女王伊丽莎白一世(Elizabeth I)统治时期，英国议会对社会动乱的威胁做出了反应，通过了赈济穷人的立法，并于1601年颁布了《英国慈善法》(Charitable Uses Act)，为建立长期慈善信托基金制定了法律框架。
扶贫立法本可授权地方官员向当地征税，但事实上，这一扶贫救济从来都是一种最后选择，用于应对私人慈善力量的不足。而商人和地主们大量捐赠，最终使得官方扶贫不那么必要了。捐赠者不仅使用新的慈善信托机制消除贫困，而且还成立了学校和医院，并建立捐赠基金，以改善他们的社区。
正如乔丹所说的：“在一个非常伟大的瞬间，各阶层的私人捐赠者做出了一个历史性决定。这可能是无意中做出的，但更重要的是，那些商界精英不仅塑造了一个国家的社会制度，还树立了社会责任的伦理规范，后者则成为了自由社会的特征。”
孕育了第一个慈善业黄金时代的环境，又出现在第二个黄金时代：19世纪后半叶。社会再次处于激烈的社会及经济变革之中，而这一次的原因是工业革命。在那些从科技变革中赚取大量财富的人，与在迅速扩张的城市中忍受贫困折磨的人之间，再次出现了巨大的贫富差距。那些私下里虔诚信教，但在公共目标上信奉人道主义的富人再次行动，发起了一场减缓贫困的大规模运动。
与上一次不同，他们这次失败了。数千个私人慈善和信托机构无组织的行动，完全不能应对都市化、工业化时代存在的社会问题，接近维多利亚时代末期，这一点愈发明显。19世纪末，社会不满日益增长，维多利亚时代的有识之士开始意识到，国家必须承担公共福利的首要责任。
在一定程度上，正是这一点导致慈善事业在20世纪的大多数时间里呈衰退走势。因为福利国家开始提供养老金、全民教育、免费保健以及失业津贴，对慈善团体的需求也就减少了。
那时的贫富差距也缩小了。穷人因国家福利富裕了一些，而因为必须多缴税款支付国家福利，富人也不那么富裕了。此外，战争、通货膨胀、经济衰退以及股票市场的熊市等，也减弱了财富向最富人群的集中。
在19世纪末和20世纪初的美国，慈善事业也经历了一段黄金时期，原因是安德鲁?卡耐基(Andrew Carnegie)和约翰?洛克菲勒(John D. Rockefeller)等所谓强盗式资本家在工业化过程中获取了巨额财富。但20世纪的大多数时间里，美国的贫富差距也显著缩小，因为该国(至少暂时性地)倾向于社会民主主义，比如执行较高的税收标准、社会保险及最低工资制度等。
人们通常认为美国缺少欧洲式福利，但即便如此，该国仍估计，今年将为失去配偶的人以及伤残人士支付5390亿美元的社会保险、养老金以及津贴。这一状况证明，税收已在很大程度上取代了慈善事业。这也意味着，即使比尔?盖茨(Bill Gates)全部的500亿美元――世界上迄今为止最大一笔私人财富――都被用于为国家社保预算提供资金，只要一个多月它就会被全部花光。
