It’s a bet I wouldn’t have taken ten years ago when I was at my most cynical: billionaires giving away most of their fortune to raise the quality of life for the world’s poorest and sickest. And now the trend is spreading like multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in a Russian prison. It started a couple years ago with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and has now infected the likes of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Star Wars creator George Lucas, and over 50 others as part of The Giving Pledge. From Global Poverty:

The Giving Pledge is an exclusive pact among a group of more than 50 of the world’s wealthiest people (including Gates and Buffet), who have pledged to fork over the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Take Buffet, for instance. He pledges to give 99% of his wealth to charity. With a net worth of $42 billion, he’d still have $470 million left to spare.

The Giving Pledge press release has a number of quotes from those who are taking the pledge. I particularly like George B. Kaiser’s lucid take on his own good fortune:

“I had the advantage of both genetics (winning the “ovarian lottery”) and upbringing. As I looked around at those who did not have these advantages, it became clear to me that I had a moral obligation to direct my resources to help right that balance.”

The ovarian lottery is a term Buffet coined saying that who you’re born to is, “the most important thing that will happen to you in your life, but you have no control over it. It’s going to determine far more than your grades at school or anything else that happens to you.” It refers to a thought experiment by philosopher John Rawls:

Let’s say it was 24 hours before you were born, and a genie appeared and said: “What I’m going to do is let you set the rules of the society into which you will be born. You can set the economic rules and the social rules, and whatever rules you set will apply during your lifetime and your children’s lifetimes and even the lifetimes of your grandchildren.”

And you’ll say, “Well, that’s great. I get to define what kind of world I want to live in.” But you’re smart too. You ask: “What’s the catch?”

And the genie says, “Here’s the catch. You don’t know if you’re going to be born poor or rich, of color or white, female or male, infirm or able-bodied, or homosexual or heterosexual.”

Now what rules do you want to have?

Unfortunately, that genie doesn’t exist but some billionaires (who don’t really need genies) are doing the next best thing.