Let us shed a tear for the Forbes billionaires

The Forbes world’s billionaires list is out. And let us shed a tear for the haemorrhage in the amount of money they between them control, from $4.4bn to $2.4bn.

This list immediately raises the question of what they do, and what they do for us. You see the Gateses and others in it and immediately one thinks of… Well, what does one think of? One thinks of philanthropy. What enormously generous people these are.

And, of course, to some extent it is true. But this is an America-heavy list. And in the United States tax relief and philanthropy are seamlessly bound together so that giving is intricately interwoven with taking.

Today the founder of Google, Sergey Brin (above), has given a massive sum of dollars to research into Parkinson’s disease – specifically, a gene trial. Would the “authorities” ever have got round to funding it without him? We simply don’t know the answer.

And the question is always there: would society at large be better off if all rich people paid all the taxes they are due and allowed our elected representatives to determine how to spend it?

As we shed a tear for the 30 per cent of billionaires from last year’s table who’ve been jettisoned from the list as a result of the recession, we should pause for a moment and recognise that millions of ordinary people have lost 30 per cent in their house values, in their employment prospects, and in all sorts of other ways.

And to them 30 per cent means infinitely more than it does to those on the Forbes list.