Essays & Reports

To earn a substantial fortune requires some measure of talent, plenty of hard work, and a whole lot of luck. To give it away well is at least as difficult.

Many a painstakingly-built fortune has been dissipated ineffectively in the giving phase or directed posthumously toward purposes the builder of the wealth would never have favored. To avoid these hazards, and having already provided economic security for our children, my wife Cathy and I are bequeathing upon death virtually the entirety of the family estate to the support of just two philanthropic causes. Our tightly-defined focus is in line with our joint determination that, in order to maximize the rather limited influence we can exert from our graves, we should reject the path most commonly taken by fortunate people, which is the establishment of a foundation with wide subject matter discretion and a long life. Our plan, to the contrary, is designed not only to constrain our post-mortem giving narrowly by subject matter but also to direct that the funds be disbursed and put to work quickly. Read the full essay

Centers on Wealth Inequality Reports

The Foundation has funded wealth inequality projects at eleven institutions: Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Harvard Kennedy School, Brown University, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University College London, University of Michigan, UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics, Paris School of Economics, and the University of Munich. The report that follows is a summary of the progress made by eight of the eleven institutions as of September 30, 2023.