It’s hard to deny the fact that we’re living in an era of new and escalating crisis. From COVID to climate change to threats against democratic governance, this is a deeply uncertain time. For many, it’s a deeply dangerous time. That reality has led many in the philanthrosphere to question old perpetuity models and advocate for more aggressive spending in the here and now—especially from a far upper class that seems as reticent as ever to part with its money.
That’s why it was jarring to hear about a new philanthropic project dedicated not to spending more, but to spending less—in fact, to spending essentially nothing at all for a long, long time.
The Patient Philanthropy Fund, housed at Founders Pledge, is an experiment in philanthropic long-termism. Based on the credo that “future people matter,” its approach is simple: amass a pool of capital and let it sit in investment funds until a critical point at which the money can be used “to safeguard and improve the future of humanity.” The focus appears to be on potential catastrophic risks to human life—things like nuclear war, pandemics (ahem), unforeseen threats from artificial intelligence, or maybe an asteroid impact.
According to a write-up in Vox, the fund’s initial capital is modest—$1 million, from donors including Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype. But the plan is to fundraise toward a goal of $100 million and use that to create a separate charitable organization that’ll steward the money. Philip Trammell, an economist who helped develop the idea and sits on the fund’s four-person management committee, told Sigal Samuel at Vox that “the fund will end up doing the most good in those cases where there’s either a really sharp spike in need or a fall in funding.”
Trammell and his colleagues have put a lot of thought into this. In a paper titled “Patient Philanthropy in an Impatient World,” Trammell lays out a case for the fund’s approach, arguing at length that philanthropists can do more good by investing for future spending than by spending now.
It’s an iteration of the “invest to give” mentality—itself an iteration on “earning to give”—and as such, it ticks many of the boxes that have made such effective altruist giving philosophies controversial. That is, things like an overzealous application of cold utilitarian calculus to the idea of “good,” and an under-appreciation of the harms that may be done by choosing investments purely for their “higher expected long-term financial returns.”
Founders Pledge, for those unaware, is fully steeped in the effective altruist mindset. Headquartered in London, it got its start as a platform to help tech entrepreneurs get into giving when they offload their startups. The organization has enjoyed support from effective altruist royalty like Open Philanthropy founders Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, as well as Eric and Wendy Schmidt. It operates several funds for members to contribute to—this one is the third—and offers advisory services to a set of donors who can’t get enough of the idea of strategic philanthropy.
Looking at the Patient Philanthropy Fund in particular, there is something to be said for its overall goals. After all, one of the big purported strengths of philanthropy is that it can operate over long timescales, independent of shifts in consumer interests or political whims. Societies tend to favor the here and now over future generations, or even our future selves, a tendency that makes existential threats like climate change all the more difficult to allocate resources to.
But while it’s easy to knock this new fund for intentionally failing to step up today, in a moment of tremendous need, an even bigger problem with the Patient Philanthropy Fund is that it’s kind of superfluous.
Founders Pledge does a good job of documenting how the fund will work, and why it’s adopting this long-term approach. But what it doesn’t quite answer is the question of how this pot of money differs from trillions already sitting on the sidelines, patiently earning dividends in the investment portfolios, DAFs and foundation endowments of the well-to-do.
Yes, there are future-proofing principles built into the fund’s framework and a level of basic direction that doesn’t exist with the majority of stockpiled lucre. But when push comes to shove, there’s already a vast amount of potential philanthropic capital on hand to respond to any emergent threat. Unless some fundamental shift in world affairs makes wealth-hoarding the exception rather than the norm it has become, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
What’ll most likely be lacking when disaster strikes, as we’ve just seen with COVID and have watched for years with climate change, is the moral and political will to draw upon existing private capital in a way that meets the moment.
Besides, even $100 million left to compound over the decades—never mind a mere $1 million—won’t grow into anything that today’s ultra-billionaires can’t already commit on a whim. It certainly won’t compare to what governments can bring to the table. The money is already there; we just can’t seem to get those who hold the purse strings to spend it. Guarding humanity from long-term threats is a worthy goal, but it’s unclear how this new fund will be any different, as it waits to step in until the moment the right disaster arrives.
A better approach might be to commit to one existential threat up front and orient the fund’s long-term work toward tackling that problem. Sure, that limits the fund’s options, but what it provides is a sense of direction to distinguish this bit of invested capital from the billions upon billions already sitting around out there.
Having committed to a particular threat, fund managers can zero in on that space and develop a better sense of when and how to step in, better at least than if they’re trying to keep an eye on every potential crisis. The fund already plans to make small annual grants of less than 1% of the fund’s size to “build a track record and have an incentive to keep the research partner list up to date.” Tackling one specific threat could be a way to make that grantmaking less cursory and more impactful, perhaps by fostering the careers of researchers who want to make that problem a focus of their life’s work.
One could imagine a whole range of such long-termist funds, each dedicated to a specific catastrophic risk and orienting its work toward the cultivation of relevant knowledge, infrastructure and talent. Fund managers could be drawn from that talent pool, and invest the endowment in such a way that it doesn’t conflict with the fund’s mission.
That said, this all feels a bit hypothetical, divorced from the realities that are truly threatening humanity’s wellbeing, and money and expertise alone aren’t enough to face these problems down. As we’ve seen with philanthropy’s timidity around confronting the threat of climate change, funders need to be willing to lean into ideological and political battles, long before we hit crisis points, taking on entrenched interests and allying with folks outside existing power structures.
Well-intentioned as they are, the issue with strategies like this new fund—and many other effective altruist approaches—is that they’re rooted in a set of values representative of the donors involved, while masquerading as objective truth. And those funders tend to be mostly white, well-to-do social entrepreneur types who enjoy enough personal distance from current problems to ponder, and privilege, the hypothetical problems of the future.
