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.
The vaccine alliance Gavi boasts more than 18 million lives saved. The charity portal GiveWell claims 340,000 lives 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. 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 — and there are others to boast about, too, as Scott Alexander detailed a few years ago, after Sam Bankman-Fried generated a wave of bad press for the movement that he’d done so much to fund. E.A. spending, Alexander calculated, is now saving 50,000 lives each year.
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 — and increasingly — 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’s presidential campaigns — 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’s 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 “giving back” to those with less and a bit more like an assertion of plutocratic control over yet more aspects of collective life — even if you’re very glad to see the money donated rather than hoarded.
The culture of philanthropy has been changing, too, as I wrote last year — shifting from the focus on development and inequality in the era of the Gateses and the Giving Pledge “to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity.” The number of new signers to the Giving Pledge has dwindled, 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 that he’d be leaving his wealth not to the Gates Foundation but to his children.
This may all sound like a story about the world’s very richest people, but the recent pattern isn’t confined to the tiniest top sliver of the income distribution, where the centibillionaires live. As Jeremy Ney and Zoe Siegel recently highlighted, two decades ago, about two-thirds of American households donated to charity, a pattern long recognized as distinctly American — at least, as the country used to define and distinguish itself. According to Ney and Siegel, in 2024, that share was just 41 percent, with much of the decline concentrated in the last ten years. Among the well-off, who have always given more generously, charity has dropped dramatically, too: Twice as many rich households now make no charitable donations as in 2015.
