Bill Gates’ warning to the world

The optimistic, liberal spirit of the early aughts has given way to darker times.

Photo by Christophe Viseux / COP28 via Getty Images

In 2005, Tony Blair hosted the G8 summit at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. It proved to be one of the high points of a long period of liberal optimism. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer,” Blair declared at that year’s Labour Party Conference.

After an economic boom, G8 member states – then including Russia – agreed to write off $40bn of debt owed by 18 poor countries and to increase aid to Africa by $50bn. The UK and its European partners committed to spending at least 0.7 per cent of GDP on international development. “If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act,” observed Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park.

Two decades on, this activist spirit has dissipated. The world has entered darker times: the 2008 financial crisis destroyed the illusion of perpetual economic growth. Russia and China – which Western leaders assumed were on a reformist path – have embraced authoritarian nationalism. A succession of crises – the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine – have diverted attention from international development. G8 members such as the UK and France have cut aid spending (in Britain’s case from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent). In the aftermath of the pandemic, global life expectancy fell and extreme poverty rose for the first time in decades.

In his interview with Jason Cowley on page 20, Gates grapples with this changed world: “I am an optimist,” he insists, “But I’m worried about polarisation, I always worry about bioterrorism, I worry about nuclear weapons, I worry about climate change, and now I would add AI; although it’s the most positive innovation, it happens so quickly that it will be quite disruptive”.

Under Donald Trump, who will take office for a second time on 20 January, the world risks entering a new era of self-defeating protectionism. The president-elect has vowed to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all products entering the US from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10 per cent tariff on China.

Trump exemplifies the populist turn that horrifies progressives. But rather than merely lamenting this trend, liberals must seek to understand it.

While market-driven globalisation was portrayed by leaders such as Blair as both desirable and inevitable, for many ordinary voters it was neither. In unequal and unbalanced economies, higher GDP did not guarantee higher living standards. Real-terms pay for blue-collar US workers is little above its 1970s level – one reason Trump’s disruptive programme appeals. (“I would tax more progressively,” says Gates of inequality.)

Rather than welcoming the transfer of power from nation states to remote, undemocratic institutions, voters revolted. Though Brexit is sometimes cast as a uniquely British phenomenon, it was a local version of an EU-wide insurgency. At the heart of the European project – Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands – nationalist parties are now either in power or close to it. Traditional parties of the centre left and the centre right face a common struggle for relevancy.

All of this demands reflection rather than simply condemnation. As John Gray writes in his recent book The New Leviathans, populism is too often “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”.

But scepticism must not degenerate into cynicism. “The human condition is better today than at any time in history,” asserts Gates. Debatable, but the record of the last 250 years remains striking: average global life expectancy has increased from 29 years to 73 and the rate of extreme poverty has fallen from 90 per cent to 9 per cent (with the post-pandemic increase now reversed). Such gains would not have been possible without a confidence that we can improve the human condition. Our ingenuity – as demonstrated by the rapid Covid-19 vaccine rollout – retains the potential to transform the lives of billions of people.

As they reckon with their multiple defeats, progressives must avoid the twin temptations of fatalism and utopianism. The creation of a project adequate to these new times is far harder – but also more rewarding.