Michael Bloomberg talks tough on health and junk food
By: Andrew Jack
This article was originally featured in the Financial Times: http://bit.ly/MikeBloomberg
The first floor of Bloomberg’s London headquarters looks unusually busy even by its normal frenetic standards. Staff are taking calls, leaning into their computers and scurrying past the signature aquarium and television screens flickering with data tickers. In the central hall, free food and drinks are on offer, reducing the temptation for employees to stray too far or too long from their work.
The media group’s driven, 75-year-old owner is in town, keen to talk about his philanthropy and especially one of the more recent themes he is supporting. Michael Bloomberg, businessman, philanthropist and former mayor of New York, with a net worth of $52.3bn, has added a near-indigestible job title to his schedule over the past year: the World Health Organization ambassador for non-communicable diseases.
That means he has redoubled his focus and grant-making around ill health linked to poor lifestyle choices such as the excessive consumption of sugar, salt and fat, which can drive conditions including diabetes and heart disease. His approach builds on his three-term New York mayoral legacy in clamping down on junk food and his track record in aggressively tackling the tobacco industry.
“Non-communicable diseases are different than communicable ones because, in the end, you’ve got to make some personal choices,” he says. “In the third world . . . [people] have never had access to the things that you should have in moderation or not use. More people are dying from non-communicable diseases than from communicable ones. That’s never happened before. In fact, more people are dying from obesity than starvation, for the first time in the history of the world.”
His comments sit a little incongruously with the free biscuits, crisps and other snacks nestled alongside healthier options visible from the glass-walled office where he settles down to talk. Yet he dismisses any irony. “Do we have full-sugared drinks or only diet?” he asks his aides. “We have full sugar,” replies one. “But small cups,” adds another.
Bloomberg argues that there is consistency in his doctrine of free choice, which applies to his advocacy against unhealthy food just as much as to longer-standing efforts to tackle smoking. “The bottom line, I’ve always thought, is that it’s government’s job to explain what the risks are in certain kinds of behaviour and then you as an individual have a right to do it.”
He banned smoking in workplaces in New York, “where other people have to breathe your smoke or lose their job. But if you want to go into a field where there’s nobody else around and smoke, I don’t think we should take away your right to kill yourself.”
He has, however, sometimes taken a more interventionist approach. His health commissioner tried unsuccessfully to take a similarly tough approach on unhealthy food in New York, with a proposed ban on “Big Gulp” giant soda servings, which was rebuffed in the courts. “We won that by sort of losing,” he argues. “If you take a look at [soda] sales, they’ve plummeted around the world. So we really did win that; if they had [just conceded], it wouldn’t have percolated around the world.”
As with smoking, he has supported campaigns to impose additional taxes — notably on full-sugared drinks. “It gives [elected officials] a revenue source [and] there’s a lot of evidence when you raise the price, people use less of it.” But where tobacco kills, “pizza, if you use it in moderation, [has] nothing wrong with it”.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has donated to many causes, but when asked what he considers his greatest impact so far, he singles out smoking. He argues that the campaign to raise taxes and restrict marketing “has probably saved more lives” than any other public health measure. “For the first time around the world, the sale of cigarettes is going down.”
More broadly, he singles out his role in supporting advocacy, including on highly political issues such as gun control. Many other donors are hampered by legal restrictions on their charitable giving or simply because they do not want to antagonise. But he says: “I’ve always thought saving people’s lives is more important [than] keeping somebody happy.”
Bloomberg concedes that “as I drive by the sign that says Bloomberg School of Public Health or the Charlotte Bloomberg Children’s Hospital, that gives me pleasure, I suppose. But most of our funds go to things where the name is not on the building; it’s on programmes rather than stone.”
Despite some very substantial personal donations to art galleries, including the Serpentine in London, he has placed emphasis on smaller cultural organisations. “A lot of our work is to help small art museums around the world get going. How do they create a board? How do they build or borrow a collection? How do they attract visitors? As opposed to just giving a big cheque to the Met or the Tate.”
He also spends considerable time with networks of city mayors around the world that he has cultivated and helped fund, with a focus on training and efficiency. “There’s an awful lot of societal problems that local government can work on. [They] really deliver the services where the rubber meets the road.”
A final target for his philanthropy has been climate change, where he remains optimistic despite President Trump’s recent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement climate conference. He laments the signal but argues that most action is taking place elsewhere and Barack Obama and the federal government more widely “didn’t do a lot” either. “It would be a lot easier if the president was committed to COP21 and I hope that he will change his mind,” he says, referring to the Paris climate agreement. “Having said that, in America most of the progress in reducing man’s impact on the climate has come from local governments, city governments or the private sector, individuals and corporations.
“We’ve reduced greenhouse gases dramatically in America already. I think one of the effects of the president coming out against COP21 has been to galvanise a lot of people to say we’ve got to do something.”
Alongside his expanding donations, set to reach $700m this year, Bloomberg has also overseen an evolution in the structure of his foundation. It has grown to 125 staff, who co-ordinate grants to partner organisations; and he has strengthened his board to 24 people, including business executives, former Democrat and Republic politicians and his two daughters, Emma and Georgina.
His profits from the media business — 86 per cent of the total — go into the foundation, which has assets of approximately $10bn (they are invested ahead of any donations). When he dies, he says all his Bloomberg shares will also pass to the philanthropic group. “My daughters are on the board but can’t work for the company and will never run it. I’m very much opposed to nepotism.”
After five years, the shares must be sold: either to a private buyer or potentially a public listing.
How long his foundation will outlive him is a current subject of reflection. “There is a lot of discussion among my friends about how rapidly you give it away,” he says. “I’m more inclined to short term rather than long term, simply because why not save some lives now?” But, he adds: “It depends on how long I live. My mother lasted to 102. Every time I do the math, that’s 27 years left to go.”
On two issues he is unrepentant. He dismisses suggestions by some critics of philanthropy that business executives’ greatest contribution to society would be to pay more taxes rather than accumulating wealth and then spending it at their own discretion.
“Nobody thinks that if they did that, they would do any of the things that private philanthropy is doing. Government demands specificity and a guarantee of results which you can’t do [when you are innovating]. Government would never have funded the transition from Old Masters to Impressionism . . . or funded charter schools. You’d certainly never have the diversity of programmes and we don’t know which are going to be the successful ones.”
Second, Bloomberg is focused on another physical legacy: his new London headquarters, close to the River Thames and nearing completion. He has just come from a tour of the site and claims not even to know the total cost. He argues in the layout that “you should focus on what’s best for your people and then find a way to pay for it” — with an emphasis on collaboration. “It’s going to be spectacular and make our employees more productive.”
If he is supportive of measures to improve physical wellbeing, he has no misgivings about maintaining a pressured working environment for employees. “I hope so. People would tell you that about [Amazon’s Jeff] Bezos’s place . . . about [Tesla’s] Elon Musk’s place. But just think about the impact those companies are having on the world. There is a lot to be said for demanding quality and hard work.”
For him personally, as for his business and his philanthropic activities, those are characteristics he shows no sign of relinquishing.
