Opinion: Billionaires Can Buttress Gates’s Poverty Prediction

Following the prescriptions laid out in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2014 annual letter, and concerted giving by the world’s wealthiest, could help bring to fruition Mr. Gates’s forecast that there will be almost no poor countries left in the world by 2035, a New York Times columnist writes.

Timothy Egan says Mr. Gates “backed up his claim” in the letter, which sought to debunk myths about poverty, population, and development aid that the billionaire philanthropist said block or overshadow significant global progress in overcoming economic, social, and medical ills.

Noting a contemporaneous Oxfam report that 85 billionaires control as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people, Mr. Egan writes that if those 85 people took the Giving Pledge to donate half their wealth, “it would hasten the audacious prediction of Bill Gates.”