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".
富人为何行善？(上)
过
去，成为大慈善家有个额外好处：人们会为你竖起一座雕像，以表敬意，你将由此获得一种满足感。以乔治?皮博迪(George Peabody)为例，这位19世纪的美国商人在移居英国之后，产生了在全伦敦建造社会福利住宅的兴趣。像他的皮博迪房产一样，他如今仍和我们在一起：他坐在椅子上的雕像被安置在伦敦的黄金地段，在其对面就是针线街(Threadneedle Street)上的伦敦证交所(LSE)旧址，后者前些年才刚刚搬走。他的传记作者评论称，皮博迪坐在了“大英帝国最昂贵的椅子”上。
的确，很少有商人能进入伟大的领袖、战士、哲人和诗人之列，并在塑像中成就不朽的声名。
然而，慈善事业也有负面的东西。不论它在哪里盛行，潜在的怀疑倾向总是萦绕左右。人们会问，是什么驱使那些毕生都在赚钱的人把所有钱都捐出去，做出如此明显的利他主义和慷慨大方的无私行动？――他们赚钱时往往都是很无情的啊。
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智者通常都已经有答案了。英国诗人尼古拉斯?布雷顿（Nicholas Breton，1545-1626）将慈善事业定义为“沽名钓誉”。英国剧作家约翰?盖伊（John Gay，1685-1732）评论称：“从做善事得到的乐趣，胜过其它所有个人享乐。”法国小说家古斯塔夫?福楼拜（Gustave Flaubert，1821-1880）说：“每一件好事都让人万分自豪。”在《魔鬼词典》(Devil’s Dictionary)一书中，美国讽刺作家安布罗斯?比尔斯（Ambrose Bierce，1842-1914）将慈善家定义为：“一位富有（且往往秃顶）的老绅士，这样的人练会了在自己的良心促使其掏腰包时微笑。”
诚然，至今为止，还没有人为微软(Microsoft)联合创始人比尔?盖茨(Bill Gates)和投资者沃伦?巴菲特(Warren Buffett)立像。分别是全球第一和第二富豪的他们向慈善事业捐赠了巨额资金，而且可能是历史上最大规模的慈善行为。
不过，有样东西也不见了，那就是怀疑论调。看起来，要么是数额确实庞大的慈善之举造成了麻痹，使我们已经忘记如何反应；要么就是盖茨和巴菲特承诺捐赠的金额如此巨大，以至于先一步堵住了哪怕是些许质疑的空间。
这样吧，让我们以一种自私吝啬、充满敌意、玩世不恭和愤世嫉俗的精神，重拾一个古老的传统，想想是否慈善事业有时不仅仅与热情和仁爱有关。
简述一下盖茨和巴菲特承诺的捐赠：今年6月，巴菲特承诺，将把他在伯克夏-哈萨韦公司(Berkshire Hathaway)财富、价值约370亿美元的股份捐给慈善事业，其中310亿美元捐给比尔及梅林达?盖茨基金会(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)。由于盖茨自己的捐赠，盖茨基金会目前已成为美国最大的基金会，获捐金额超过290亿美元。而就在数周前，盖茨已宣布，他大约会在2008年从微软退休，以便将更多时间投入到自己的慈善工作上。
对于这些捐赠，或许任何愤世嫉俗者首先注意到的是，它们没有包括任何自我牺牲。盖茨和巴菲特只是交出了过剩的财富，意味着其中一部分对他们而言没有其它用处。他们甚至也没有全部捐出这部分钱。
最新的《福布斯》杂志(Forbes)亿万富翁排行榜显示，盖茨目前仍是全球首富，甚至在他做出捐赠后，其财富仍有难以想象的500亿美元；而巴菲特目前估计拥有约440亿美元财富。传媒声称，巴菲特的捐赠是“利他主义的非凡捐赠”和“令人吓掉下巴的慷慨之举”，但他将仅仅捐出其中的85%，还剩66亿美元的“零钱”。
从这种程度上讲，和这两位亿万富翁相比，与一个要饿死的朋友分享自己面包皮的穷人当然是个更伟大的利他主义者。
同时，巴菲特一直因其不贪慕虚荣而受到赞誉，因为他将资金捐给了盖茨基金会，而不是以自己的名义建立一个慈善信托基金。但这个决定让他成了一个相对消极的投资者，尽管他在盖茨基金董事会有一个席位。
然而，盖茨却积极地参与到自己基金会的工作当中，并将在淡出微软之后，更多地参与慈善工作。不过，像多数慈善家一样，他未能抵御让自己流芳百世的诱惑：如果不能立个塑像，那么就留下自己创建的、以自己名字命名的基金会。
我们可能也会注意到，这种慈善观念与两位富豪的事业道路颇有些格格不入。对于76岁的巴菲特而言，慈善捐赠行为来得太晚，他的一生几乎完全沉湎于积累巨额财富之中；而作为微软董事长兼前任首席执行官，盖茨肯定会像我们任何一个人那样，对于他发现自己突然拥有了社会良知感到吃惊。要知道，微软在人们心目中一直是个无情的“公司恶霸”。
说到底，这些人为美好事业承诺如此大笔的捐赠当然是非常了不起的。但他们还能用钱做些什么呢？就像古老的真理所言：生不带来，死不带去。这远远超出他们合理花费的数目。他们都不想将巨额财富传给下一代，因为他们认为，如此规模的不劳所得会剥夺有意义的生活。
因此，如果促使巴菲特和盖茨做出慈善行为的不是纯粹的利他主义的话，那么又会是什么呢？是布雷顿所说的沽名钓誉，还是沉湎于盖伊所谓的“超越任何其它个人享乐的乐趣”？或者是福楼拜所指出的自豪，还是比尔斯指出的良知？
如果有一个简单的答案就好了。在没有准确猜出其它人行为背后的潜意识的情况下，我们很难大胆的说出，激发我们明显的利他主义行为的潜在动机――可能是内疚，或者是人性责任感，抑或是一种模糊的迷信看法，认为善有善报，恶有恶报。
