Once, not long ago, the sudden arrival of this amount of new philanthropic money would have been hailed, pretty universally, as a godsend. And the third wave is poised to arrive in the wake of some world-historical achievements by the philanthropists who came just before. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has a plausible claim to having helped save 82 million lives, though it has also launched high-profile initiatives that have failed, introduced policy-distorting spending in some developing countries and generated a sometimes conspiratorial backlash to its work around the world.<\/p>\n
The vaccine alliance Gavi boasts more than 18 million lives saved. The charity portal GiveWell claims 340,000 lives<\/a> saved around the world, and what was once Open Philanthropy and is now Coefficient Giving has a defensible case for having saved over 100,000<\/a>. The broader effective altruist movement of which both are a part can reasonably estimate 200,000 lives saved through the distribution of bed nets for malaria. These are all enormous achievements \u2014 and there are others to boast about, too, as Scott Alexander detailed<\/a> a few years ago, after Sam Bankman-Fried generated a wave of bad press for the movement that he\u2019d done so much to fund. E.A. spending, Alexander calculated, is now saving 50,000 lives each year.<\/p>\n But even in the wake of those achievements, this looks like a strange and not especially hospitable political environment into which a new overclass of philanthropists may be parachuting. The third wave of philanthropy, should it materialize, will be an unmistakable outgrowth of the A.I. boom, about which Americans are already \u2014 and increasingly \u2014 anxious and resentful. It will arrive amid a new, fraught politics of extreme wealth, which has come to cloud more of American social and political life than it did even in the years of Occupy or Bernie Sanders\u2019s presidential campaigns \u2014 not just because extreme wealth has grown substantially since the 2008 financial crisis but because political spending by billionaires grew more than 150-fold, too. And it will come at a time when the country\u2019s superelite often sound as anti-establishmentarian as anyone in the 99 percent, often trash-talking collective action and government spending. Perhaps this is one reason their nonprofit spending can look a bit less like \u201cgiving back\u201d to those with less and a bit more like an assertion of plutocratic control over yet more aspects of collective life \u2014 even if you\u2019re very glad to see the money donated rather than hoarded.<\/p>\n The culture of philanthropy has been changing, too, as I wrote<\/a> last year<\/a> \u2014 shifting from the focus on development and inequality in the era of the Gateses and the Giving Pledge \u201cto a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity.\u201d The number of new signers to the Giving Pledge has dwindled<\/a>, in recent years, and some have predicted there will be a year soon when more people leave the group than join it. In 2024, Warren Buffett announced<\/a> that he\u2019d be leaving his wealth not to the Gates Foundation but to his children.<\/p>\n