September 8, 2020 | Read Time: 6 minutes
For the past year, since the 50th anniversary of the original moon landing and amid the harsh entrance and unfolding of a pandemic that has affected the entire globe’s citizenry, I have been running a philanthropy-supported publishing experiment on Medium.com titled the Moonshot Catalog. The goal has been to inspire the nation’s more than 2,000 ultrawealthy households to mobilize a smidgeon more — even 1 percent more — of their collective wealth to help solve big problems that threaten our future.
A single percent may seem a small fraction to devote. But when you consider that the richest families have amassed a net worth of more than $4 trillion, that 1 percent tops $40 billion — enough to make a real difference in any number of ways. This truth only magnifies now as we approach a more honest reality-based acknowledgment of the systemic racial and social inequities and injustices that have shunted so much wealth, privilege, and security into such a rarefied micropercentage of the world’s 7.8 billion people.
Such was the simple conceit underlying the Moonshot Catalog, which just came to a close: The deepest pocketed among us would up their philanthropy game if they were more aware of hugely consequential projects they could help usher to the finish line by donating a tad more of the wealth they control.
The effort to catalog some of the most promising projects started with deep research to find global-scale challenges whose realizations remain on the wish list due, perhaps largely, to lack of funding. With support from Schmidt Futures, the philanthropy of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, I then assigned top-tier writers to dig deeper and tell the stories of these good-for-the-world moonshots that a philanthropic embrace could hasten toward successful endpoints.
The first moonshot articles had titles including “Feeding 2050’s Ten Billion People,” “Taming the Diseases of Aging,” and the now tragically premonitional “Ending Pandemic Disease.” Subsequent articles featured achievable solutions for our carbon-emission crisis, including ones replacing current cement and cooling technologies, underappreciated perpetrators of climate change that are responsible for some 16 percent of the world’s carbon emissions; next-generation battery technology, without which much of the potential benefit of renewable energy will remain untapped; advanced nuclear-power plants safe enough to help enable a carbon-neutral economy; and hastening the arrival of fusion energy.
Also in the Catalog’s mix are articles about agricultural innovation that accommodates rapid climate change; drug manufacturing that can render lifesaving medicines accessible to all global citizens; collaborations to prevent the era of antibiotics from coming to an end; pathways to better and faster learning; and circular economies in which societies live well, doing so within the limitations of materials, energy, and environmental fragility. The Catalog’s final “moonshot article,” posting, published in July, is about preparing supply chains for the next pandemic, a must-do project that we now know can save millions of lives.
No Magical Thinking
Common to these projects, and others such as the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals, is the huge and difficult commitment each one demands. Many require a unique, creative, and sustained synthesis of science, engineering, entrepreneurship, policy and financial support, and international cooperation.
But there is no magical thinking in the Catalog. The projects are demonstrably doable. What’s more, humanity already has successfully taken on comparably ambitious challenges. Think of the eradication of polio, the development of birth-control technologies, the mitigation of acid rain and the ozone hole, and the great, albeit imperfect, public-health win of municipal water treatment. Oh, and the 1969 moonshot.
Doers in the world have taken real steps toward all the moonshots’ destinations. Right now there is a real-time, whole-earth effort to summon humanity’s collective brilliance, will, biomedical knowledge, and public-health skills to overcome the most urgent challenge most of us have experienced — the Covid-19 pandemic.
Each moonshot that humanity pulls off will yield a world of good. Each will contribute to a sense of promise about the future that seems to have been lost sometime between the 1969 moon landing and now. Each will fight off self-defeating cynicism that our problems are too big to solve. Each will be a gift of optimism that can feed a new round of moonshots.
This is where the ultrawealthy have a privilege all their own. At some point, another billion dollars or another magazine profile cannot trump the opportunity to earn a better-angel legacy by leaving the world palpably better off than it was before.
Here’s just one of many possible leads: The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations estimates that for about $3 billion each, a vaccine could be developed for each of the 9 priority infectious diseases specified as most devastating by the World Health Organization. (The coalition has now also embraced Covid-19 as a priority disease with the stated goal to “end the acute phase of pandemic by the end of 2021.”)
This means a handful of multibillionaires could grow old knowing they were the financial agents in all of history who hastened an end to these disease scourges. Here’s another lead: Maybe one rogue multibillionaire could see to it that engineers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and governments deliver the next-generation cooling technologies without which meaningful carbon-emission reductions will not be possible.
Expert Advice Is Available
Donating big money in effective ways that solve big problems is not easy; neither is it obvious how to do it. But no one with billions to spare needs to feel at sea. A phone call away are philanthropy consulting organizations, such as the Bridgespan Group, whose raison d’être is to provide would-be donors with bespoke assistance in identifying and expressing their inner philanthropic selves. One article in the Moonshot Catalog serves as a primer in this respect for the motivated billionaire.
The Catalog was spawned from conversations with Tom Kalil, chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures, which subsequently funded the project with administrative assistance from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A Multibillion-Dollar Opportunity
A defining component of our discussion was a set of statistics published by Bridgespan in 2018. These indicated that ultrawealthy Americans were giving to charitable causes at an annual rate of about 1.2 percent of their assets, even as those same assets had been swelling at the S&P 500’s 9 percent average rate over the past 20 years. The math suggests that even if the country’s wealthiest donated seven times what they had been (about $45 billion in 2018), their assets still would keep growing rather than shrink. The opportunity for the richest to do so much good, with little financial pain, could not be more present, especially in this era of long-overdue public attention on disparities in wealth, justice, and well-being.
America went to the moon in 1969 with an investment of public treasure and will. A Cold War win might have been the smallest outcome. The moonshot also infused our culture with science and engineering, boldness in spirit, institutional bravado, and other traits that opened entrepreneurial pathways that underlie much of today’s billionaires club. The rest of us have benefited mightily, too. The original moonshot project catalyzed advances in computer science, materials science, meteorology, nutrition research, to name a few, that we otherwise might only have gotten to decades later.
The same dynamic can unfold now. Never before has there been so many billionaires with as much opportunity to leverage their abundant resources to achieve genuinely priceless gains. Who will step forward and aim for their moon?
Ivan Amato is writer, editor, podcaster, and science café host based in Hyattsville, Md.
