Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

“The Internet’s rich are giving it away, their way,” proclaimed the New York Times in 2000. By 2004, charitable giving in America had increased to $248.5 billion, the highest yearly total ever. Two years later, the number was $295 billion. By 2007, CNBC had taken to calling our era “a new golden age of philanthropy” and Foundation Giving reported a record-setting 77 percent increase in new foundations established in the past decade, an addition of more than 30,000 organizations. Certainly those numbers dipped during the recent recession: 2 percent in 2008, 3.6 percent in 2009. The ten-year low was in 2010, but that was also the year Bill Gates put $10 billion toward vaccines, the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause. 2010 was also the year that Gates and Warren Buffett, the two richest men in the world, announced the “Giving Pledge,” which asks the nation’s billionaires to give away half their wealth to philanthropic and charitable groups within their lifetimes or at the time of their deaths. George Soros, Ted Turner, and David Rockefeller signed up almost immediately. Skoll too was an early joiner, as was Pierre Omidyar. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, AOL creator Steve Case, and Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz have all signed on as well. As of July 2011, the total had risen to sixty-nine signatories, with more joining all the time.