‘A 99 per cent tax would be justified’: The woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

how to, microsoft, ‘a 99 per cent tax would be justified’: the woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

Natalie Cargill

Imagine the possibilities if the richest one per cent of the world’s population each donated 10 per cent of their income, or 2.5 per cent of their total wealth, to philanthropic causes each year.

As it happens, Natalie Cargill has done that imagining for us. The 33-year-old ex-barrister and Longview Philanthropy, the organisation she created in 2018 to encourage the very, very rich to ‘give more and give better’, published a report this autumn which reckoned the proceeds would be at least $3.5 trillion a year in addition to the $1 trillion already given to charitable causes. That would be substantially more than Britain’s entire GDP and enough, she contends, ‘to rewrite the future of our planet’ and ‘utterly transform our world’.

Of that total $258 billion would, for example, be sufficient to ensure that nobody lived in extreme poverty for a year; $1.22 trillion would ensure everyone in the world had access to clean water and sanitation; $341 billion would end hunger and malnutrition.

Longer term, $272 billion would be sufficient to ‘massively suppress or eradicate’ malaria, tuberculosis, HIV Aids and the worst tropical diseases; $297 billion could prevent the next pandemic; $175 billion could fund contraception for women, maternal care and care of newborn babies for five years; $662 billion would double global spending on clean energy research until 2050.

And so the list goes on, with some loose change left over.

Pie in the sky? Interviewed in Longview’s office in the trendy technology hub that is London’s Shoreditch, Cargill readily admits that she is unlikely to see giving on that scale in her lifetime (a colleague describes the report as ‘an exercise in imagination grounded in research’). But she is nonetheless a woman on a mission.

how to, microsoft, ‘a 99 per cent tax would be justified’: the woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

Natalie Cargill: ‘Philanthropy has in some circles been written off. I think people see it as self-serving’ – Eva Vermandel

She wants to restore the public image of philanthropy – tarnished by the likes of the Sackler family who used it to distract attention from its responsibility for America’s opioid epidemic, or by oil companies sponsoring art galleries to ‘greenwash’ their reputations, or by repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia’s making handsome donations to British universities.

‘Philanthropy has in some circles been written off. I think people see it as self-serving… I think the public perception of philanthropy is really, really skewed in the direction of “It’s a scam. It doesn’t work. Just pay your taxes,”’ says Cargill. Or, as the report states: ‘At its worst, [philanthropy] continues to be used for corporate gain; buying influence over and reliance from recipients, reputation laundering, “greenwashing”, and more.’

She wants a sceptical public to realise that nimble, ambitious philanthropy is, and always has been, a huge force for good that fills the gaps left by a private sector whose raison d’être is making money, and by insular, slow-moving, cash-strapped governments preoccupied by short-term electoral politics and domestic issues.

‘Philanthropy is at its best when it does what governments can’t and the markets won’t do,’ she says, paraphrasing Microsoft’s Bill Gates who, like the financier Warren Buffett, has pledged to give away most of his vast wealth.

Above all, Cargill wants to use philanthropy to dispel what she describes as a pervasive ‘culture of pessimism and defeatism’ in the face of the seemingly insoluble existential problems confronting the world.

‘We are not doomed. We don’t need to resign ourselves or our loved ones or our fellow humans or future generations to unnecessary or avoidable suffering because we really can solve our biggest problems,’ she declared in a Ted talk in April.

It was, she points out, the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation that enabled the agronomist Norman Borlaug to trigger the ‘Green Revolution’ in the 1940s by developing high-yielding, disease-resistant crops, thereby tripling global cereal production and saving hundreds of millions of people in the developing world from famine.

In the 1950s a single wealthy philanthropist, Katharine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester Company fortune, funded the development of the first contraceptive pill at a time when the US government and pharmaceutical industry wanted nothing to do with such controversial research, giving hundreds of millions of women unprecedented control over their own bodies.

As the Cold War intensified, a wealthy North American investment banker and businessman named Cyrus Eaton funded the first of the so-called Pugwash Conferences which kick-started the process of nuclear arms control. Around the same time, the American March of Dimes organisation launched a nationwide fundraising drive that financed Dr Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine.

Two days before this interview with Cargill, an Irish-American named Chuck Feeney died. He made an $8 billion fortune from duty-free shops then gave it all away – anonymously – to an array of good causes in the fields of health, education, human rights and reconciliation including the Northern Ireland peace process.

Feeney subscribed to 19th-century philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s maxim that ‘the man who dies rich, dies disgraced’. He wore a $10 watch, travelled on public transport and ended his days in a two-bedroom rented flat in San Francisco. ‘He was a hero,’ says Cargill. ‘I hope all billionaires take inspiration from his life.’

Climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, artificial intelligence running amok: the world faces challenges of a gravity unprecedented in human history. ‘We’ve never been in a situation where we’re so likely to have a really globally catastrophic disaster in the next few decades,’ declares this tall, dark-haired woman with pale blue eyes who yearns to mend the world. ‘We have never needed philanthropy more than now.’

Cargill’s father, Mahdi, was arguably a beneficiary of philanthropic largesse. He was born into a family of Bedouin nomads in the Jordanian desert, but won a scholarship to study in Britain at the age of 16. After high school in Aylesbury he studied medicine in Sheffield, where he met Cargill’s mother, Christine, a nurse.

The couple had three daughters, of whom Cargill is the oldest. Her father taught her that ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl. God made you and you can do anything’, she says. Her mother did charitable work and always ‘stood up for the underdog’.

Cargill’s own idealistic streak became clear while she was still at primary school and began an ultimately futile campaign to have meat banned from the family dining table and school canteen. Now married to a psychiatrist, Simeon, she is still vegetarian and semi-vegan.

how to, microsoft, ‘a 99 per cent tax would be justified’: the woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

Natalie Cargill imagines the possibilities if the richest 1 per cent donated 10 per cent of their income – Eva Vermandel

She also visited Jordan for family holidays and was shocked at the way some of her female cousins were treated as second-class citizens – forced to wait on their brothers and cover their heads. That ‘massively’ offended her, she says.

She was raised in Welwyn Garden City, where her father was a GP until he went to work for the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland. From an international school in Geneva she secured a place at Lincoln College, Oxford, won several academic prizes and earned a first class degree in English.

To help pay her way, she worked in the holidays at the Geneva-based non-profit Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, taking notes at meetings, and was struck by how tiny amounts of well-directed money could make an enormous difference to people’s lives. Small sachets of micronutrient powders costing a few pennies each could, for example, prevent children going blind from vitamin A deficiency.

By contrast, she worked for another Geneva-based charity after graduating that sought to teach about human rights to women in the Middle East. It was a waste of money. The women were not interested, and were not the transgressors in any case.

Before that ‘it never occurred to me to think about costs and benefits, which sounds ridiculous but it’s just not part of the language of global development very often – or at least it wasn’t,’ Cargill says.

In Geneva she was befriended by Fatsah Ouguergouz, an Algerian human rights judge with whom she worked on a project to establish a minimum age for marriage in the Arab world. He encouraged Cargill to study law. She did so with the help of another philanthropic gift, a Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Scholarship awarded by the Middle Temple. Having passed her exams she joined Serjeants’ Inn Chambers in London and was called to the bar in 2016. She began to specialise in public law. One of her first jobs was helping the public inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell fire by sifting mountains of evidence for relevant material.

But she continued to feel the tug of altruism. In her spare time she lectured at universities on the merits of social activism. She also became a friend of Liv Boeree, a female poker champion who was encouraging her fellow players to give a percentage of their winnings to charity, and she began advising them on where their donations could have the greatest impact.

There are no guaranteed outcomes in philanthropy, she says, but poker players are unusually good at evaluating risk. ‘They don’t just give their money away. They think probabilistically.’

how to, microsoft, ‘a 99 per cent tax would be justified’: the woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, whose vast fortune funds the world’s largest charitable organisation – Getty

Another friend, Simran Dhaliwal, was a young research analyst at Goldman Sachs and giving much of her income to charity. They would meet in a churchyard off Fleet Street at lunchtimes to discuss their futures, and in 2018 Cargill, then aged 26, decided to take the proverbial plunge. She quit law and set up Longview Philanthropy (originally known as Effective Giving UK) with Dhaliwal joining her soon afterwards.

It was an agonising decision, and telling her chambers that she was leaving was one of the most nerve-racking things she had ever done. ‘I’d just qualified so this was quite a ridiculous thing to do, stupid on the face of it,’ she says. Law ‘was what I had wanted to do for a very long time. I had worked really hard to get there and it was an extremely promising career path.’

Cargill happens to believe that billionaires should pay 99 per cent tax. ‘I think that would be morally justified. Global inequality is just so, so, so extreme,’ she says.

She also believes they have a moral duty to give away much of their fortunes, and argues that 10 per cent is a very modest amount – no more than the ‘tithes’ that some religions ask of their adherents.

‘I think we know that beyond a certain amount of money there’s not really a lot you can do to improve your life, and I think you reach that amount of money a lot sooner than most people think,’ she says.

Five years after setting up Longview Philanthropy, she and her team of 14 full-time employees are now doing their best to facilitate that giving. The non-profit, itself financed to the tune of roughly £3 million a year by various wealthy benefactors, offers bespoke advice to family foundations, high earners, heirs to fortunes and other members of the ‘one per cent’ (technically that one per cent includes anyone with a net income of more than $60,000 a year, and no children, but Longview offers free services only to those able to donate more than $1 million a year).

It acts like an investment fund manager for philanthropists. It discusses their desires and wishes, introduces them to experts, does the research, suggests where and how they can channel their money to the best effect, spells out the risks, helps them execute their individual plans for giving and keeps them updated on the results. ‘A lot of people have literally no idea where to start. It’s extremely overwhelming,’ she says.

Longview focuses on challenges that are relatively neglected, that have the potential to cause global catastrophe, and where donations can have a big and speedy impact. They include biosecurity, climate change, nuclear weaponry and the dangers posed by AI.

‘Sometimes people will say, “I want to do whatever’s effective. What do you think?”, and we will tell them. Sometimes they’ll say, “I want to do climate change. What do you think is best?”, and we’ll tell them. If they say they want to do something that’s completely nothing to do with what we’re interested in, then we’ll say we’re not a good fit,’ says Cargill.

‘If you’re a billionaire and you come to me and say, “I want to do this useless thing. Please facilitate me doing that,” – it’s not what we offer.’

Longview also turns away those who have ulterior motives for making philanthropic donations. ‘Philanthropy done badly is really awful,’ says Cargill. ‘It can be just a PR smokescreen – “never mind my negligent business practices. I’ve done a little bit of philanthropy. I’ve hosted a dinner.” And people want that to absolve them.’

Longview has to date worked with more than 20 philanthropists and overseen the distribution of $60 million in grants. That has far exceeded Cargill’s initial expectations. ‘It’s gone really well… It’s been incredible,’ she says. And while some of the programmes that have benefitted may seem a little arcane, they are unquestionably important. Longview’s donors are, for example, funding an organisation that flags the purchase, anywhere in the world, of dangerous pathogens that could be used for bioweaponry.

how to, microsoft, ‘a 99 per cent tax would be justified’: the woman telling billionaires how to give away their wealth

Natalie wants a sceptical public to realise that philanthropy is a huge force for good – Eva Vermandel

It is financing studies into the screening of sewage and wastewater for pathogens to give much earlier warnings of looming pandemics.

It is funding the Center for AI Safety, and a database to record all cases of AI causing harm. It supports the Nuclear Information Project, which monitors whether countries are abiding by the arms-control treaties they have signed. It has funded a conference on the development of ‘far UVC’, a fledgling technology that could potentially kill all airborne viruses without harming humans.

‘We’re specifically looking for transformative technologies and projects that could go a long way to solving some of the biggest problems we face, but are being ignored by governments and the markets,’ she says. ‘If just one succeeds it justifies the whole portfolio.’

It is an approach that has won Longview some impressive backers, including Justin Rockefeller, the great-great-grandson of the oil magnate John D Rockefeller.

He specialises in making investments that have a beneficial social impact, he told me: ‘Longview does work that is otherwise largely neglected by most philanthropists, but is critical both to achieving the right outcomes, and to advancing discussions about philanthropy’s purpose. When I first met the team at Longview Philanthropy, I thought, “This is the approach I’ve been waiting to be so well articulated, and this is the mission-driven team to execute it.”’

Martin Crowley, a professional poker player who raises money for charity, emailed me to say: ‘Years ago, I found that there was no more inefficient market than charity selection and that some charities are a thousand times better than others. I support Longview because they help donors like me find and donate to the best charities.’

He added: ‘If donors knew about these huge discrepancies in effectiveness, many of them would not just give more effectively, but give more generously and enthusiastically.’

For Cargill, who gives 10 per cent of her own relatively modest salary to charity, the pertinent question is not why billionaires would practise philanthropy, but why they would not. ‘It’s an immense privilege to be able to do something to improve the lives of your fellow humans, and it’s a real shame not to take advantage of that if you can.’

Or, as Chuck Feeney once said: ‘I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living, to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition.’

%n

Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day’s agenda from The Telegraph – direct to your inbox seven days a week.

News Related

OTHER NEWS

How to watch today's Kansas City Chiefs vs. Las Vegas Raiders NFL game: Livestream options, kickoff time, more

Patrick Mahomes #15 of the Kansas City Chiefs warms up prior to an NFL football game between the Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs at Empower Field At Mile ... Read more »

Dieser Brief macht Freisinger Kinder „fix und fertig“: König Charles meldet sich bei Drittklässlern

Schöne Überraschung Dieser Brief macht Freisinger Kinder „fix und fertig“: König Charles meldet sich bei Drittklässlern Dank für die Glückwünsche: Das königliche Paar schickte ein Einen besonderen Brief verfasste im ... Read more »

How to recreate the 'Friends' moist maker Thanksgiving sandwich

How to recreate the 'Friends' moist maker Thanksgiving sandwich Jessie James Decker shared the Thanksgiving sandwich from her cookbook. ByKelly McCarthy November 24, 2023, 4:01 AM Jessie James Decker has ... Read more »

How to Identify an Authentic Bangladeshi Jamdani Saree?

, Nov. 26 — Jamdani saree, an emblem of Bangladeshi tradition, symbolises cultural richness and artisanal finesse. Distinguishing a real Jamdani from cheaper replicas necessitates keen attention to intricate details ... Read more »

How to watch today's Buffalo Bills vs. Philadelphia Eagles NFL game: Livestream options, kickoff time

Stefon Diggs #14 of the Buffalo Bills warms up before the game against the New York Jets at Highmark Stadium on November 19, 2023 in Orchard Park, New York.  / ... Read more »

Fix garbage collection to elevate Jinja's appeal, Babalanda says

The Minister for the Presidency, Milly Babalanda, has advised Jinja city leaders to avoid haphazard developments by strictly enforcing physical planning guidelines, so as to sustain the town’s beauty to ... Read more »

IREDA IPO: GMP remains strong; know listing date, how to check allotment status

The allotment status of IREDA IPO can be checked online through the official website of BSE. While Tata Technologies IPO remained the more popular choice among subscribers this week, the ... Read more »
Top List in the World