Fighting global poverty Thomas Pogge * Abstract Many different indicators are used to monitor poverty and poverty-related deprivations. Two kinds of legitimacy worries may arise about any such indicator: one regarding its reliability as a measure of progress and another regarding the uses to which it is being put. This essay will touch upon both worries, beginning with the latter. I. Claiming credit for improvements In 2006, legendary investor Warren Buffett announced the largest charitable gift of all time. He pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune – then worth about USD 44 billion (cf. Loomis, 2006) – to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ten years later, with nearly USD 20 billion already transferred, 1 Buffett wrote a letter to the Gates couple asking them to reflect on what they had done with his gift, on what had gone particularly well or poorly, what they had learned and what they hoped would be achieved in the future: ‘I’m not the only one who’d like to read it. There are many who want to know where you’ve come from, where you’re heading and why. I also believe it’s important that people better understand why success in philanthropy is measured differently from success in business or government. Your letter might explain how the two of you measure yourselves and how you would like the final score card to read. Your foundation will always be in the spotlight. It’s important, therefore, that it be well understood. And there is no better way to this understanding than personal and direct communication from the two whose names are on the door.’ 2 Though entitled ‘Warren Buffett’s best investment’, the Gates couple’s 6,000-word response is remarkably inadequate to Buffett’s modest request. Instead of providing information about the work of their foundation and justifying the decisions they had made against the background of alternative priorities, they provide some choice statistics about how the world has become better in recent years and how people are often unaware of how much progress there has been: ‘122 million children under age five have been saved over the past 25 years’; ‘the number of childhood deaths per year has been cut in half since 1990.’‘Coverage for the basic package of childhood vaccines is now the highest it’s ever been, at 86 percent’ vs. 77 per cent in 1990. The number of women in developing countries using modern methods of contraception has increased from 200 to 300 million in thirteen years, while it took decades to reach 200 million. New polio cases have decreased from 350,000 in 1988 to thirty-seven in 2016. With regard to poverty, the Gates couple refers to a Glocalities global survey of 26,492 people from twenty-four countries. This survey found that 70 per cent of respondents believe that global poverty has increased by a quarter or more since 1990, 18 per cent believe it has stayed about the * Yale University. E-mail: thomas.pogge@yale.edu. 1 See <www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Foundation-Factsheet> (accessed 11 October 2017). 2 Reproduced at <www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter> (accessed 11 October 2017). International Journal of Law in Context, 13,4 pp. 512–526 (2017) © Cambridge University Press 2017 doi:10.1017/S1744552317000428 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552317000428 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.90.50.6, on 17 Apr 2019 at 21:24:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at