As the festive season gains steam, most of us will contemplate giving over the coming weeks. In addition to purchasing gifts for our nearest and dearest, many will engage in private acts of charity. According to The Wheel, 77 per cent of Irish adults donated to charity in 2022, while The Irish Times reported that in 2019 Ireland ranked fifth in the world for giving, with the article appropriately subtitled “Small-scale giving is in our nature”.
However, the obvious benefits of small-scale charity often lead us to overlook the qualitatively different world of large-scale philanthropy. It is precisely this kind of philanthropy, now often referred to as “impact investing” or “philanthrocapitalism” among insiders, that forms the topic of investigative journalist Tim Schwab’s book.
Although this is his first book, Schwab is not a rookie journalist, and he has selected an ideal subject for his investigations. Gates’s lengthy history of personal and professional controversy is included, including his relationship with former business partner Paul Allen, which the book’s intro details in slightly gossiping fashion. Gates presides over the second-wealthiest charitable organisation in the world, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which holds close to $70 billion in assets. To put this in perspective, only the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the de facto primary shareholder of the insulin and Ozempic producing Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical company, is wealthier.
It has become an article of faith among the upper echelons of society today to believe that one can and should “get rich by doing good”. Potential conflicts of interest that may arise in the attempt to achieve these two vastly different goals are routinely brushed aside. Schwab, conscientiously and meticulously, makes it his business to expose these inevitable conflicts, drawing on interviews, records and the research of numerous scholars.
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One chapter, Family Planning, for example, details how having determined that hormone implants would be the ideal way to increase contraception usage, the Gates Foundation cut deals with manufacturers Bayer and Merck to buy their implants bulk and take on the risk of getting them into women’s arms. Not only can such practices coupled with the foundation’s own targets (in this case, to increase the number of women using contraception by 120 million), result in pressure to choose implants over less invasive forms of contraception, Schwab details cases where women have had difficulty getting their implants removed. The resources, after all, were dedicated to getting them into arms – not taking them out again.
Schwab tackles this issue (and others, ranging from journalism to education to agriculture) from a left-wing, progressive angle. At times, the author wears this allegiance on his sleeve, inadvertently slightly weakening his own points. While there is certainly something of the “white man’s burden” (as one chapter is titled) in Gates’s charitable actions, it’s unlikely that this truly amounts to “white supremacy” as the text occasionally suggests, nor does Gates have to achieve such a level of villainy for his actions to be corrosive. Indeed, as Schwab himself relentlessly points out, the issue with Gates, and other mega-donors, is not so much one of conspiracy as confusion.
We must ask ourselves what the consequences truly are of allowing Gates, and others, to give the public the strong impression that they are running the world, when the reality is that few notable philanthropists have ever held a position of public responsibility (former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg provides a rare exception). If we want people to have faith in democracy, we cannot afford to erode the clear lines between voting and decision-making, replacing this with vague ideas of “stakeholders” and “governance”. If we want people to respect our institutions – educational and professional associations, for example – we cannot afford to allow philanthrocapitalists to muscle them out of the conversation. Most importantly of all, we cannot reasonably expect ordinary people to pay hefty tax bills when billionaires such as Gates often avoid tax, believing they can “spend it better”. As Schwab points out, in a chapter laconically entitled Bloat, large charities can be poorly audited, and many, including the Gates Foundation, have a reputation for wasteful spending on staff salaries, expenses and self-congratulatory PR.
As this indicates, although it is relatively US-centric and does not always satisfyingly clinch its own arguments, The Bill Gates Problem is certainly thought-provoking work, contributed by an empathetic and detail-oriented writer with the courage to take on this crucial dimension of social inequality. Important reading for any politico who desires to be truly up-to-date on the issues of our time.
Dr Roslyn Fuller is the author of Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose and In Defence of Democracy
