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With the release of his latest book, Bill Gates is enjoying fawning profiles meant to set him apart from other tech billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who have all come under increased scrutiny for their recent turn to the right. While he may not be using technology to further political divisiveness, Gates does have an important kinship with his fellow billionaires, past and present: the paternalistic belief that his fortune, no matter how ill-gotten, is a good thing, because hes using it to save the world. This philosophy was first laid out in 1889 by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans in history, in an influential essay titled the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegies response to the rising progressive sentiment of his day was to argue that wealth concentration is beneficial to society because it incentivizes innovation, efficiency, and economic growthand it also provides a further social good through philanthropy. The harsh treatment of workers and environmental degradation became worth the price of thousands of libraries. Sound familiar? Todays tech leaders provide almost the exact same logic for the legitimacy of their fortunes and as a justification for inequality. Influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, explicitly refers to this as a deal he believes exists between Silicon Valley and society, such that tech moguls should be given significant freedom to generate wealth through the innovations they create, and any negative societal or environmental impacts that result will eventually be offset by their future generosity. Andreessen says Joe Bidens breaking of this unspoken compact is what led to his and other tech leaders rightward turn and support of fellow billionaire Donald Trump. But of all the philanthropists following the neo-Carnegie deal, Gates is the pacesetter, despite the fact that there has been significant criticism of this model. Carnegies ideas are so discredited that when I taught a class on philanthropy at Harvard Kennedy School a number of years ago, we read Carnegies Gospel in the first session as an example of what not to do. Not only is the idea that business success somehow gives individuals both the right and the expertise to determine solutions to vexing social issues problematic, the Carnegie model is a blatant guidebook for philanthropy-washing and undermines democracy by concentrating decision-making in the hands of unelected billionaires rather than public institutions. Like Carnegie, the start of Gatess philanthropy was closely tied to significant critiques of his business practices and the source of his wealth. Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft was sued by the U.S. government for bundling Internet Explorer with other products in anti-competitive ways. When videos of Gatess deposition for the case were made public, his image took a significant hit. He came across as evasive and arrogant, refusing to acknowledge basic facts, denying understanding of common words like concern and support, and often dodging accountability. While at the time he and other tech moguls were known as the cyber-stingy for their lack of giving back, like Carnegie he came to see philanthropy as a way to restore and eventually burnish his reputation. Today there are many public testaments to the work of the Gates Foundation. For instance its funding of vaccines for polio, rotavirus, and COVID-19 and its work on malaria and HIV prevention have been estimated to have saved well over 100 million lives. But like Carnegie, Gates work has also come under criticism for a selective focus, and reflecting a billionaires know best ideology. While Carnegie’s interest in building libraries and museums was laudable, it reflected his own biases and priorities, not the needs of the communities he sought to serve. At the time, the working-class and immigrant communities that suffered from his businesses employment practices often had little access or interest in these institutions, and would have benefited more from labor protections, housing, or public health infrastructure. Some of the Gates Foundations most well-known failures also illustrate an underlying imperial style that reflects Gatess own idiosyncratic interests rather than grassroots, democratic solutions, resulting in questionable outcomes.The Foundations education reform efforts pushed for standardized testing and charter schools in the U.S., which ignored teacher expertise and worsened inequality. In Africa, it has promoted industrial farming and genetically modified cropsoften against the wishes of local farmers who advocate for sustainable, small-scale agricultureand a number of reports have shown that these activities have not provided food security. Similarly, Gatess focus on addressing climate change centers on questionable technologies like direct air capture and geo-engineering that require extensive financial support rather than addressing emissions reductions solutions that consider climate justice needs.Many of my students who had worked in nonprofits expressed significant frustration about the dominance of the Gates Foundation in skewing the nonprofit landscape to Gatess personal interests, and further, how its bias toward quantification reflects a rigid, engineering-style approach to problem-solving that ignores the cultural, social, and historical contexts that shape human behavior. This is seen as a root cause of its educational reform failures. A focus on creating measures of teaching effectiveness and tracking them in detail led to stress for teachers, and contributed to teaching to the test, as opposed to more meaningful learning. This overly data-driven approach to philanthropy also closely tracks with effective altruism (EA), a philosophy that has wide resonance among the tech-elite. EA advocates a strict utilitarian logic to ethical decisions and treats problems as optimization puzzles rather than complex moral or social dilemmas. For example, its focus on assessing the outcome of charity based on the metric quality-adjusted life years ignores how such measures implicitly devalue certain groupssuch as the disabledand any approaches that dont fit into a neat cost-benefit framework. Disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist, and Elon Musk has described EA as a close match for his own personal philosophy. The level of hubris exhibited by Gates, Musk, and Andreessen when rationalizing their actions hasn’t been seen since the Gilded Age. But we cant forget that theres a reason why tese 19th-century industrialists were known as robber barons. Our current era has much in common with Carnegies day, when leaps in industrial, communications, and transportation technologies transformed the ways that people lived, and also led to extreme income inequality and the rise of a new class of ultrarich entrepreneurs. There was political gridlock and significant backlash against immigration too. Eventually, outrage at the widespread and systemic injustice of the Gilded Age led to the Progressive Era. But will todays polycrisis of climate change, economic inequality, public health challenges, and more create enough momentum for a fundamental shift in how we assess wealth and its sources? During the second Trump administration, it may be tempting to rely on Gates and his cohort of good billionaires, as newly elected Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin recently suggested. But there will be no 21st-century Progressive Era unless we start to question how one person is able to amass such wealth in the first place.
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On the evening of January 7, the Eaton Fire hit Altadena, destroying more than 10,000 commercial and residential homes and displacing thousands of families. Just a little over two months later, and this historically Black community is facing a new threat. Shortly after the fire, a private developer paid $550,000 in cash for the first vacant lot left behind from the wildfires, about $100,000 above asking price. In the days since, at least 13 more properties have sold, at least half of them by offshore private developers. But community leaders are working to beat back the tide. Last month, a Pasadena-based housing justice nonprofit purchased a burned lot in the neighborhood, marking the first Altadena property that has been removed from the market and protected in a community land bank. Jasmin Shupper, a Pasadena resident and founder of Greenline Housing Foundation, worked with land use attorney Remy De La Peza to purchase the lot using a $500,000 grant from The Pasadena Foundation. The pair is speaking with other residents about purchasing their fire-burned properties and is offering Greenline as an alternative buyer for any property owners who need to sell but would like to keep the land in the communitys hands. Greenline has positioned itself to act as a land bank, holding the property to eventually transfer it for community use. Its a way for people to protect the land from acquisition costs that rise on a speculative market while community members decide how to best use the property as Altadena reimagines its future. Most of the buyers were LLCs or corporate entities, a number of them were multipurchase buyers, which means theyre purchasing three or four lots, Peza says. Thats an investment strategy purchase. Its unfolding exactly as she and other community members feared when the fires hit, Peza says. Meanwhile, she says, philanthropic groups have raised millions for recovery since the Eaton Fire, but few of those dollars are flowing toward community land bank initiatives. She and Shupper are constantly being asked to speak with potential funders who ask how they can help. While they have been very clear that what they need is help acquiring the land, the money has not come in. We cannot compete with these developers, says Peza. We need philanthropy donors to step up, or Altadena will end up permanently in the hands of corporations. While state officials have put forward some legislation to protect the community from private investors, including bills SB 782 and SB 658, Peza says its not enough. One of the challenges with state legislation is that the community is still beholden to the state legislative cycle and calendar. None of the bills that were put forward were passed through the urgency process; even if they pass, they wont be put into legislation until the fall. Peza notes that Altadena does not have the same legislative limitations at the county level; rather than having its own city government, as most municipalities do, Altadena is managed by the Los Angeles County supervisors. Technically, local policy can be passed at any point, and there is more that we need to be demanding, Peza says. We need to be focusing on the county level and making sure the county supervisor is taking care of us. Why Altadena residents are vulnerable to outside investors Peza believes Altadena is particularly vulnerable to displacement through disaster capitalism because it has a high concentration of Black and Brown residents. Theres also a high number of seniors who are not as connected on social media, where the majority of resources are being shared. One main factor pushing residents to consider selling is the isolation this disaster has caused. Altadena mirrored an idyllic movie-like community before the fires, she says, where neighbors knew and cared for each other. Now residents have been forced to go to shelters, stay with people in other parts of California, or simply leave the state altogether. When you dont have your team rallying together, its hard. People cant just go next door and ask their neighbor, Hey, what are you doing? Are you thinking about selling? like they used to, Peza says. That social network and capital has been lost. With its older population and multigenerational owners, many in Altadena also lack home insurance. Once a homeowner pays off their mortgage, home insurance is not necessarily required. With insurance rates spiking in recent years, many people in this community have forgone their home insurance and are left with nothing except the land. Their only option is to sell. At this rate, Altadena cannot wait, says Peza. For residents who lost their homes and dont plan to rebuild, but do want the future land use to remain in the community, Greenlines leaders say its land bank is available to purchase those lots. Through their land bank model, Greenline is offering a community-centered alternative to selling to private purchasers. After the purchase, Greenline will work with residents, local housing organizations, and community stakeholders to determine the shared needs and desires for the land. It is important that the community knows that there is an organization that is here for them, and that is committed to ensuring the wonderful community of Altadena is protected and restored, Shupper says. We hope this is the first of many such purchases and that it will be a beacon of hope for the community. This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next Citys newsletter for its latest articles and events.
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When it comes to wealth, most of us think about money. You measure your financial wealth by looking at your assets and your debts. But there are other areas in your life where you can be wealthy, including time. Would you consider yourself time-affluent or are you living the life of a time pauper? Time wealth is all about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things, says Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. Building time wealth is about awareness and action, says Bloom. Be aware that time is your most precious asset and the one thing that you can never get back. Then act in relation to that awareness by treating time accordingly. Do not allow it to simply exist where you are a passive taker of time, says Bloom. Create time for the things that you care about. Time and energy While you could make more money, you cant make more time. You can, however, prioritize energy-creating tasks that unlock more time in your day. Outcomes follow energy, he explains. The things that you are pulled towardsthe things that you have a natural attraction towardstend to be the things where you end up generating the best outcomes. For example, when youre working on something that interests you, investing a unit of energy could generate 10, 100, or 1,000 times the outcome over something that feels like drudgery. In effect, you unlock time by generating the same output with fewer units of input. You now have more units of input, or energy, that are freed up to do other things. Identifying energy-creating tasks goes back to awareness and action. For the awareness piece, Bloom recommends creating an energy calendar. Looking at your schedule, color code your activities according to the energy they created or drained. If a task lifts you up and makes you feel energized during or after the activity, mark it green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow. And if you physically felt depleted from the activity, mark it red. After a week, you will have a clear visual perspective of the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy from your life. Let energy drive your schedule Awareness is the starting point for making slight, subtle changes over longer periods of time. While Bloom says you probably wont be able to eliminate all the energy-draining activities from your lifethats a bit of a pipe dreamslowly reposition your calendar. For example, prioritize energy-creators at the start of your day to ensure you get the most done. Home in on them and making them a bigger part of your life. Also, adjust the energy-draining things to make them less depleting. For example, Bloom worked in a high intensity finance role in 2019 and 2020. Phone calls and video meetings, which consisted of at least five hours of his day, were a huge energy drainer for him. The first reaction when you hear something like this is to think, Well, I can’t change that. That’s a huge part of my job, he says. But if you scrape a layer deeper, you can ask the question, Are there adjustments I can make to the way that I’m doing this that would make it neutral or energy creating? Focus on what drains your energy Bloom decided he could take some of the calls while on a walk, which created energy because he was outside, moving around. Also, I can’t multitask when I’m walking, so I’m more focused, more present on the call, he says. I took half of my phone calls and made them into walking calls. I was still doing the exact same work, but I was doing it in a way that was significantly more energy creating, which led to significantly better outcomes. Another way to let energy drive your schedule is by batching activities to leverage the different levels. For example, confine some of the energy drainers to a single block, so you arent hitting speed bumps throughout the day. Another suggestion is to put two energy creating activities around an energy draining activity. Manage them more effectively, so that you can get through to the other side more efficiently and in a happier date of mind, says Bloom. Prioritizing what matters The entire point of considering time a state of wealth is to recognize that it is your most precious asset, and you need to intentionally design our time now. In fact, Bloom argues that the most dangerous word in the dictionary is later. We say it to ourselves all the time, he says. I’ll spend more time with my kids later. I’ll prioritize my relationship with my partner and friends later. Ill find my purpose later. Later becomes another word for never, because those things won’t exist in the same way. Later, your kid won’t be five years old. Later, your partner and friends won’t be there for you if you’re not there for them now. You won’t magically wake up with purpose later. Investing time now will pay off in dividends later, creating time wealth that can be richer than money can buy.
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