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article by philosopher Peter Singer entitled “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?” Singer says Warren Buffett has given away more than twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars as the legendary philanthropists of a century ago, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Bill Gates has already given away well over a third of his fortune. Buffett intends to give away over 95 percent of his, saying he wants to leave his children “enough so they feel they could do anything but not so much they could do nothing.” Zell Kravinsky of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, gave almost all of the $45 million he made in real estate to health-related charities when he was in his mid-forties, keeping only his home and enough to meet his family’s living expenses. Then, when he learned that thousands of people die from kidney failure every year while waiting for a kidney transplant, he donated one of his own kidneys to a stranger. Kravinsky believes all lives are of equal value. Since the chances of dying as a result of kidney donation are about one in four thousand, his decision made perfect sense to him.

Singer explained how wealthy Americans alone could pay our nation’s fair share to meet the Millennium Development Goals without going as far as Buffett or Kravinsky. The estimated cost of the effort was $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion in 2015 (it’s actually less, given the funds already being spent and those that are pledged). Singer believes the United States should pay at least 36 percent of the bill because that’s the percentage of U.S. domestic product of the wealthiest nations that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (our share of global GDP is about 27 percent).

Working from 2004 U.S. tax data, he says that if the 14,400 taxpayers in the top .01 percent give a third of their income (averaging $12,775,000) to combat the world’s most severe problems, the total would be about $61 billion. If the top 0.1 percent, 129,600 taxpayers, give away a quarter of their income (averaging just over $2 million), the giving would total close to $65 billion. If the top 0.5 percent, 575,900 taxpayers, give 20 percent of their income, total giving would be $72 billion. There are 719,900 in the top one percent. If they give 15 percent, it would raise $35 billion. If the rest of the top 10 percent, 13 million of them (with an average income of $132,000), give 10 percent, it would come to about $171 billion. That’s a total of $404 billion just from the top 10 percent of Americans. Singer then argues that this $404 billion should be matched by contributions from wealthy individuals in other countries and their governments, bringing the total to $808 billion, more than six times what it would take to meet the goals. Singer believes we should raise these goals and do more faster.

While Singer’s analysis shows how America could pay more than its fair share of the Millennium Goals budget from private giving alone, I think it’s unrealistic to expect this level of giving to global causes in the short run, for several reasons: some wealthy people don’t believe the money will be spent wisely (although I hope I’ve persuaded you in the previous chapters that it can be); some people with high incomes but little accumulated wealth want to build an estate before they give a large portion of their money away; $132,000 a year goes a lot further in Little Rock than it does in New York City; and many wealthy people are already committed to giving money to other charitable causes in America. U.S. foundations gave away more than $40 billion in 2006 alone.

Let’s look at a more modest scenario. If the top one percent simply give 5 percent of their income to meet the goals, the top .01 percent would give $9.2 billion; the top 0.1 percent, $13 billion; the top 0.5 percent, $18 billion; the top one percent, $12 billion. If the rest of the top 10 percent give one percent of their incomes to the cause, it would raise another $17.2 billion. The total would be nearly $70 billion, more than enough to meet 36 percent of the cost of