Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Calls for a 'Kinder Capitalism'
Strudelkugel writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates is going to call for a revision of capitalism. He will argue that the economics that drive much of the world should use market forces to address the needs of poor countries, which he feels are currently being ignored. 'We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,' Mr. Gates will say in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 'Key to Mr. Gates's plan will be for businesses to dedicate their top people to poor issues — an approach he feels is more powerful than traditional corporate donations and volunteer work. Governments should set policies and disburse funds to create financial incentives for businesses to improve the lives of the poor, he plans to say. Mr. Gates's argument for the potential profitability of serving the poor is certain to raise skepticism, and some people may point out that poverty became a priority for Mr. Gates only after he'd earned billions building up Microsoft. But Mr. Gates is emphatic that he's not calling for a fundamental change in how capitalism works.'"
The World Bank and IMF loan these countries money, which is then paid out to contractors specified by the WTO. These contractors then give a piece to local officials and do nothing. Where you now have a 3rd world country with a 4 Billion dollar loan at 30% with nothing to show for it. Which means that they borrow another 4 Billion to actually do the work they paid for the first time, and the cycle continues. Unless Bill Gates controls the world bank, he's going to have to find another hobby. You can't save the poor on this planet. The rich own them.
Jeffrey sachs a famous american economist who was for a time special advisor to UN secretary general Kofi Annan wrote a book published in 2005 titled "The end of poverty" where he details just such a revision. see http://www.amazon.com/End-Poverty-Jeffrey-Sachs/dp/0141018666/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201185744&sr=11-1
this is not as ironic or impossible as it sounds at first sight, Sachs is not a dreamer, what he wants to achieve is not suppressing all of poverty, but to suppress life threatening poverty. To do this he proposes to help the poor countries get back on the development ladder by using slight modifications to the market forces. once they get on the development ladder he argues, extreme poverty should disappear pretty fast (his proposed time frame is 20 years )
He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto
Having been there myself several times last year (it's not too far from where I live), I wouldn't really call Soweto a failure of capitalism. It arose primarily under the old apartheid system as a collection of around 30 "black townships" (roughly = "black ghettos"), and the system for the blacks was basically an oppressive fascist police state, while for the whites, at best socialist (e.g. major industries like telecomms, electricity, television broadcasting, steel etc. were nationalised and quite tightly controlled). The Group Areas Act of old also forced certain races to live in certain areas, and other apartheid regulations specifically DID NOT ALLOW much freedom of trade or other commercial activity within black areas like Soweto - the blacks weren't really allowed to just, say, up and build a mall, noone was. That's not capitalism. That was just 14 or 15 years ago, basically.
Now, the current government is still a 'socialist' government - when the old government fell in 1994, the new one implemented a variety of "reforms" such as minimum wage and various welfare grants and "free electricity and water for all" programs, all of which did not exist before, that are certainly far more, um, typically associated with socialism than capitalism. On the other hand they reduced the level of nationalisation of businesses, privating or semi-privatising a number of major industries for example (some of those are disasters but for complete other reasons not relevant to this topic - also not failures of capitalism though). Nonetheless the current government can best be described as "centrist", pushing things neither too far to the right nor left - it is, loosely speaking, a 'free market system for most markets but with some socialist characteristics and a bit of crony capitalism' (not unlike the US), but has only been so for 14 odd years. For Soweto, many of the zoning and movement regulations have been lifted, which means that people and companies are now more free to invest and build etc. in Soweto, and anyone, including blacks are free to start, own, run and trade in any businesses. In spite of the relative poverty, with an estimated population between 1,000,000 and 4,000,000 people (who as a result of the old zoning regs used to have to travel miles to Joburg to buy various stuff), Soweto has a combined estimated annual retail buying power of about 4 billion Rand (roughly US$500million), and this IS currently attracting a lot of investment and development, particularly by the major black 'business elite' that has risen since 1994 --- there is currently loads of development going on - new malls are springing up, office parks are going up, gyms, even hotels and basic broadband infrastructure etc. are being built in Soweto.
So I wouldn't really call this a failure either - it's just the beginning, after all, just 14 years into a semi-capitalist system with mostly poor and poorly educated people, it's starting to turn into a veritable growing metropolis / city in its own right (albeit a dangerous crime-ridden one). Of course it could be going a lot better, but I don't think it can rightfully be called a "failure of capitalism". More like, new-born capitalism is starting to help fix the wreck of a socialist police state.
It should be noted that Soweto is NOT considered one of the "poorer" township areas. It's definitely poor, but compared to most other 'black townships', comparatively wealthy (e.g. almost all houses are brick - small and rundown, but brick, many roads are tarred etc., many streets have lighting and painted lines and there are proper police stations and hospitals and electricity and phone infrastructure - unlike the real poor, 'hardcore' townships like Umlazi and Alexandra which are really thousands of little shacks.)
Remember that socialism works quite well in Sweden (that pirate country everybody is talking about).
And communism has never been implemented (soviet union had socialism). I have heard of a tribe or something in Israel that works that way, but I don't have my facts with me.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well, Bill Gates is on the record (1995) for deriding other CEOs as having only "finite greed" and not being competitive enough by moving into new markets. Odd that he would call for "kinder capitalism."
Put identity in the browser.
Apple has (in the early days you actually had to get a token) kept very tight control on who can develop on the Apple box. And third parties have to be "blessed" and pay homage to the alter of Steve Jobs.
Oh come on. XCode (Apple's IDE) and a slew of other developer tools come with every copy of OS X. Even back in the olden times of SEs and Quadras, there were numerous IDEs available from Borland (C/C++/Pascal), there was MPW, RealBASIC, FutureBASIC, etc. There really was no blessing involved that I can recall. Apple has always needed more developers on the Mac... it would go against logic to make it hard for them to enter the arena (especially in the mid-early years of Mac, Appple didn't really make much software for the platform - it was mostly third party software). Hell, going back to the Apple ][, which came with a BASIC interpreter, there was a widely distributed public domain Pascal compiler, not to mention tons and tons of third party software.
Minor spelling flame, just so people can get their Googles headed in the right direction. "Yukos" is the defunct Russian oil company stolen by Putin.
And yes Gates and Yunus have been doing the rounds of the surf'n'turf hi tech conferences lately.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Its Muhammad 'Yunus' , the 2006 Noble Peace Prize winning economist/entrepreneur from Bangladesh.