In any other week, it would have been completely absurd to hear Bill Gates, who can describe all but one other person as poorer than him, sit before the world's most powerful leaders and tell them how to help the billion poorest people in the world.
But this was not any other week. It was a moment in which the world turned upside down. When else has the world witnessed the spectacle of European leaders, assembled in the splendour of the Cote d'Azur, approaching China for something that resembles foreign-aid assistance?
"You are the rich, you borrow money from the poor," Li Daokui, an adviser to China's central bank, told the West on Friday. "It's not right for you to continue to lead a luxurious life."
As if to offer an answer, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the host of this calamitous G20 summit, had chosen to shift attention away from Europe's meltdown to the poorest people in the world by inviting one of the world's wealthiest people to offer the leaders a solution.
Bill Gates, the former Microsoft chief executive who now runs the largest charitable foundation in the world, flew in on Thursday to deliver a manifesto that explained just how countries like Canada should go about ending the world's deep inequalities – by vaccinating against childhood diseases, by boosting African agricultural production, by making remittance payments to foreign countries cheaper, and by introducing new taxes on fuel used in international transportation, on all tobacco, and on financial transactions.
On Friday morning, he sat down with The Globe and Mail and a handful of other world media to discuss his message. It is, he says, one of optimism: The past decade has seen more progress against inequality than any of the previous five.
"I'd encourage people to step back and look at the last 10 years and realize that despite all these challenges we've got in the economy, we've actually done pretty fantastic job of moving away from where we were in 1960, where you have about a third of the countries that were rich – basically the U.S., Europe and Japan – and the rest of the world was basically poor … Well, now we have these very dynamic middle income countries, and there's a lot of them."
Still, the irony is not entirely lost on him. As the first non-government figure ever invited inside the room at a G8 or G20 summit, he was addressing an issue – inequality – being denounced by a great number of people who are being kept very far away from the summit by security forces. To confront the concerns of protesters who call themselves "the 99 per cent," the G20 decided to invite a member of the 0.000000001 per cent.
Mr. Gates laughed at this comparison, but had little time for the new inequality protests.
"Good old Occupy Wall Street! I will certainly be glad to print up signs for them if they want to hold them up saying 'More bed nets!', 'More vaccines!', 'More agricultural research!' " Mr. Gates said. "I've never met any of these people ... but I haven't seen them holding any banners speaking up on behalf of the world's poorest."
Mr. Gates was invited because he has a reputation for getting things done: His foundation played a key role in getting the African AIDS crisis under control, and was the key actor behind the successful development of vaccines against meningitis and malaria.
But curing diseases and solving the global food crisis is, it turns out, rather political, and Mr. Gates spends a lot of time persuading African and Asian governments that he's not part of some Western plot, that the vaccines and flood-resistant seeds his foundation engineered aren't foreign threats – and also paying for them to develop regulatory agencies so they can help themselves.
"I wouldn't call myself a political lobbyist," he says, but "that's ended up being a much bigger category of my time than I expected …. If you'd asked me five years ago if I would expect to speak at a G20 meeting I would have said 'No, I'll be writing grants to great scientists and travelling to Africa!' "
And indeed, political lobbying was a big part of what he was doing in Cannes this week. As a philanthropist whose $33.5-billion endowment is larger than the foreign-aid programs of many governments, he still relies on those programs to match his funds and do the lion's share of the work.
So he was here to praise countries like Britain, which upheld the promise they made in 2000 to raise their foreign-aid spending to 0.7 per cent of their economies – despite dire financial crises – and shame those like Canada, which currently spends less than half that amount, far short of its promise.
After all, he says, the world's poor can't rely on the largesse of billionaires. Amid all the talk of finding innovative ways to end inequality, Mr. Gates says it really just requires some smart money.
"I resist the term 'innovative,' the word is funny," he says. "All these things we're discussing here are taxes, or borrowing now to pay back later … The term suggests there's a free source of money. No one yet has discovered a free source of money."