Helaine Olen: What are the origins of the “giving while living” movement?

Joel Fleishman: Giving while living really originated with Andrew Carnegie. In a very famous document called "The Gospel of Wealth," which he published in 1888, he said you really should spend your money during your lifetime because if you do that, you'll be in a better position to be sure that it accomplishes what you hope. Of course, Andrew Carnegie didn’t, in the end, do that. He ended up with about a quarter of his fortune left at the point at which he was about to die which he still hadn't given away. He decided then to give it to a perpetual foundation, which he created. That’s now called the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In our time, the person who is best known for giving while living is Chuck Feeney, the founder of Atlantic Philanthropies. The goal, the theory behind it, is that you could give away all of your assets during your lifetime and achieve much more. A lot of my book is about the question of how valid that assumption is.

Olen: And what do you think about that assumption?

Fleishman: If you say, “Can you achieve more in terms of diminishing hunger at present?,” I think you obviously can: If you give away a billion dollars to feed people, it's better than giving away 5 percent of a billion dollars annually. But if you're talking about curing cancer, it's a different story, because cancer is going to be cured, and indeed virtually every disease is going to be cured, by repetitive attempts to understand how cancer works and that requires hypotheses that are tested sequentially. You can't do it all at once.

My point here is that whether you can achieve significant impact really depends on what kind of problem you're trying to attack. The question is, do you care entirely about satisfying hunger or would you rather do something like figure out what's causing hunger in our system and trying to do something to correct those things that are perpetuating hunger or poverty?

Olen: But both approaches have their advantages, right?

Fleishman: Right. It’s clear that both kinds of philanthropy are needed. Solving social problems requires energetic persistence over time. It requires not only work by government, but it also requires a lot of other actors, like nonprofit organizations.

Look at the major nonprofit organizations that exist in the United States now. There are approximately 2 million nonprofit organizations that focus on a variety of problems, from the environment to race issues, to human rights, civil liberties, all those kind of things. And it has been primarily the perpetual foundations that were responsible for starting, nurturing, and indeed supporting many, if not most of the largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, and no public-policy problems have been solved in a day. The Green Revolution, for which Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation earned a Nobel Peace Prize, took 35 to 40 years before they actually did develop the new grains that transformed countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh from chronically starving countries to chronically grain-exporting countries. It couldn’t be done in a short period of time.