Re: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Description: "It's not the money; it's the ideas."

Transcript: And I mean I think the general principles of philanthropy are that giving the money is not what’s important. It’s actually what the money enables you to do, and the ideas that the money stimulates developed. So what we have to do is we have to invest these resources in solutions to these very difficult social problems that are . . . first of all, that are implementable and scalable. So you know, we don’t want to create little projects that are wildly successful but they cost $100,000 per person benefitted. We’ve got to find ways of doing things that are scalable. We’ve gotta find ways of doing things that can be implemented. And I also believe that the best philanthropy that could be invested is philanthropy that starts to work out and prove some of these models of value that I was talking about. So again, with enough resources, you can solve almost anybody’s problem. You can give them all the food they need. You can give them housing. You can give them, you know . . . You can even pay for their healthcare. You can provide free medicine. You can . . . But that’s not sustainable. What you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta find ways of equipping people with the skills, and the talents, and the attitudes, and the orientations, and the access to create their own solutions to their own problems. And that sometimes . . . That means some different kind of investments. So I worry about philanthropists who are too caring and too focused on really wanting to help people and demonstrate that they’ve . . . you know, that they’ve fed this many children, or they’ve provided this many mosquito nets. And I think . . . The Gates Foundation, I think, is starting to come into its own in terms of understanding that its greatest contribution is about ideas. It’s not the money; it’s the ideas. It’s finding and validating some sustainable models that they can . . . they can scale, but others can join. So I don’t know if that answers exactly the question of how you give this kind of vast resource, but it’s certainly the answer that I would give. I would also say that there’s a tremendous tendency in philanthropy – for example, in healthcare – to give the money for the science. You know to fund that researcher who’s gonna come up with that cure for cancer. But I think equally we have to understand that some of the most important problems of human society are not so much about the scientific, or the technical, or the tools, but they’re about the application. And so I guess I’d like to see more. I would put more – if I had it – resources into those areas.

Recorded on: 6/11/07