Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft and Co-Chair and Trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, sat down with The Economist‘s Matthew Bishop last night. Adam Ostrow from Mashable was there and offers a recap. He writes:

Bishop asked Gates about comments that the Microsoft founder had previously made about the relative stinginess of some of those in a position to give major amounts of money (i.e. – the Forbes 400), as well as the role that the financial crisis has played on philanthropy. Gates jokingly said that last he checked, the people on that list are still in a good position to give, but it’s not his interest to go recruit people into philanthropy.

Looking around the globe, Gates is optimistic that emerging markets like China and India, where vast amounts of wealth are being created amongst the super rich, will eventually become #2 and #3 in the world in philanthropy, behind the US.

As for those of us without billions of dollars to spare, Gates believes the best way to get involved is with a similar approach to his, albeit on a micro scale. His theme can be summarized as ridding the world of inequality – which for regular people, means finding an inequality that you care about and doing what you can to help, first locally, and then if you can, on a wider scale.

Read the full write-up here.

And check out the coverage from Bloomberg.com and Reuters, which both led with similar headlines: ”Microsoft’s Bill Gates Says Wall Street Pay Is ’Often Too High’ and ”Billionaire Bill Gates says Wall St pay too high,” respectively.

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