Slashdot Mirror
A Critical Examination of Bill Gates' Philanthropic Record
sam_handelman writes "The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record. His philanthropic efforts may turn out to be not as altruistic as one may think. Edweek, not ordinarily an unfriendly venue for Gates, is running a series of blog post/investigative journalism pieces into what the Gates' foundation is doing, and how it is not always well received by stakeholders."
While it seems credible that some money comes back to Bill Gates, they aren't making a strong case that this would actually be his goal. AFAIK he's getting poorer (less rich) rather than richer now. Also, he would have very little incentive to get even more money other than to pump it back into the foundation. This article does not convince me that this isn't real charity and AFAIK many projects have also been very effective and helpful.
It sounds like Edweek is complaining that the Gates Foundation channels its money through private enterprises to achieve its goals instead of corrupt African dictatorships?
Why do people think they have a voice in how a private not-for-profit spends their money? The Gates Foundation does a lot of good. This seems like a lot of knocking down the guy on top.
Donor nations were shocked last month, when UNICEF disclosed that it has been forced to pay artificially elevated prices for vaccines under an arrangement called the Advance Market Commitment, which was brokered by Gates Foundation-dominated GAVI alliance, to greatly increase drug company profits. Stakeholders also worry that industry reports of particular vaccine's effectiveness might be skewed by marketing goals.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proves once again that leopards dont change their spots.
This is a bad hatchet-job.
For example, it demonizes the Gates Foundation for having some partnerships with Monsanto. Without discussing the details of the actual partnership, and the expected status quo, and the change the partnership creates.
It effectively creates a vast conspiracy of things the author doesn't like. And then blames them on the Gates foundation, because it does some things they don't like. Like their portfolio is in a double-blind trust that can own stock in evil corporations like coca-cola. Which is a fair criticism, buried in the middle of a paragraph halfway down the page. There is some content in here, but it's either buried or so biased that it is like listening to Noam Chomsky.
And it mentions leverage like it's a dirty word.
The quality of slashdot is really going downhill when this kind of thing makes it onto the page.
So, do I need to RTFA to have that confirmed, or is that pretty much the gist of it?
Hey, I've got an idea. Try RTFA.
I know, new here etc etc...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yet people have been denying this from day one on the phrase of "oh it's philanthropic".
If someone can't figure out that working with Glaxosmithkline, Monsanto and Coca Cola (who happily works with Cargill, as if they aren't bad enough on their own) might be a bad thing, then they deserve to have a fast one pulled on them by the Gates foundation.
Maybe now people will realize that Bill Gates didn't step down to do "Great things for the world". He stepped down to continue the Microsoft concept of business and expand it *further*, outside of the US's reach.
Shout all you like that the problem with health care is the US government, nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well (Well as in, people dont die early or have to live with treatable health problems for lack of income, not well as in it makes corporates boatload of money).
You are absolutely right. Having the choice between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs ways of dealing with wealth I prefer the philanthropic effort/foundation path offered by Bill. To my mind this difference is also what eventually will make Bill stand out as as the greater man. *hides*
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Their problem seems to be that Gates is focussed on building sustainable businesses that can survive after the charity taps get turned off. That bastard!
Doesn't he realise that he is just supposed to pump money into Africa and hope that amongst the missile launchers and the AK47s, someone manages to smuggle in some penicillin?
Are we supposed to be shocked that a man who made a huge fortune in the private sector, favours a private sector approach when he is trying to get shit done?
1. It would be crazy to try to solve disease by creating research facilities in Africa, when there isn't the infrastructure or educational standard to support to work. Cures will develop much faster in developed nations.
2. Ditto with American drug companies - which African ones are large and stable enough to handle the work?
3. You're describing aid programmes with your alien tech analogy, which are flawed for the reason you give. That's not how the Gates Foundation works. I can only speak to their agricultural development work, but it is not similar to an aid programme - they invest heavily in R&D geared towards specific high-impact goals. They are investing the money where they think it will have the highest impact per dollar spent.
4. I agree about the fundamental problems in Africa, but those aren't the remit of the foundation. They are about developing technological solutions, not about steering political and economic change, which is much less concrete and difficult to engineer. Frankly, whether or not you think it's the major problem, the tech is needed.
5. MONSANTO DO NOT USE TERMINATOR GENES. NOBODY DOES. It's crazy how many people have this idea, but there have never been seed with terminator genes on the market from any company. The technology *was* developed to an early stage by the USDA and a small agro company, who were later bought out by Monsanto. Monsanto made a public commitment to abandon the terminator technology when they acquired the company.
The simple fact is that the Green Revolution worked in Asia, it raised nearly 1.5 billion people out of frequent famine. Whether or not it created a perfect system, it got massive humanitarian results. It couldn't have happened if it didn't leverage existing infrastructure including plant breeding and seed companies, as well as agrochemical producers.. The same is true of Africa - if agricultural production is to be massively increased there within a reasonable timeframe, it needs to be done using the best infrastructure we have available, which includes having the world's major seed companies involved in seed production.
Until the US government got involved, running US healthcare strictly as a business left millions of us to get sick, stay sick and die, without preventive or responsive care available. That left many millions of other people to stay trapped in a sick home, unable to live fully, work properly or contribute economically or educationally.
Since the time the US government got involved in a coordinated way, through Medicaid and Medicare, the large majority of the population has been freed from the worst afflictions, healthwise and otherwise. Meanwhile the expanded healthcare economy has completely transformed health science and practice.
You and your fellow "libertarian" corporate anarchists would return us to the bad old days. Next you'll tell us war is good for the economy, so we should have more of what ruins us.
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make install -not war
Yeah, it worked so great that in 1965 all kinds of things would have been a death sentence that are now done on an outpatient basis.
Even in a perfect free market land if you get a disease that so few people have that no money can ever be made on a cure you are totally screwed.
Even worse is that short term profit motives will slow research to a crawl on all but the most profitable sectors of drug research. We would be able to have 40 kinds of pecker medicine and not much else.
Shout all you like that the problem with health care is the US government, nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well (Well as in, people dont die early or have to live with treatable health problems for lack of income, not well as in it makes corporates boatload of money).
I hear what you are saying, and I tend to agree with you (having been in Japan, I know what good health care is, and how bad we have it here in the USA.) However, @roman_mir does have a point. Fully privatized health care DID work.
The problem here is not whether health care is privatized, or whether other countries have better health care systems with some type of government intervention. The root of the problem is the collusion of government and health care firms, which have created a self-perpetuating carcinogenic mass of middle man sitting between the patient and the physician.
Not all private enterprises are created equal. There are those that compete freely (with price controls dictated by supply and demand), and there are cartels. Two solutions to the problem exist:
1. Have a government-sponsored health care system as found in Japan or Germany
2. Have the goverment dismantle the health care middlemen cartels, forcing them to compete freely.
Either one will work, and both require goverment intervention of some form. People need to stop looking at goverment vs private enterprise as if both formed a zero-sum game, a black-n-white, matter-antimatter dichotomy. They are not. Such parrochial black-n-white window painting serve well to pander simple solutions to the simple-minded masses on both sides of the political fence, but that's the extend of its usability.
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Well, I agree most with your last sentence. 8^)
I've worked for and with NGOs and non-profits large and small, from UN agencies to universities to the independent think tank where I am now. Let me assure you that the death-knell of any non-profit is to have it taken over by someone who claims it needs to run more like a business.
Profit-making and non-profit organisations are very different in their nature and -more importantly- their culture. They each have a million ways to fail, but here's the key: Non-profit organisations can and must measure success by something other than financial returns. This impacts every single aspect of its work. It sometimes means that you can (and should) spend more time on seemingly pointless details getting things just right. It sometimes means that you work on things that you know have a high chance of failure, but you take them on precisely because no profit-making outfit can't afford the risk.
The killer on both sides of the equation, though, is complacency and power. Allow either to become too apparent and the same sociopathic personalities begin to appear at the head of the organisation. And though they die in different ways, their death is a painful spectacle. Non-profits, especially those with guaranteed budgets, get over-run by careerist know-nothings who spend more time agonising over their per diems and life-saving meetings than actually thinking about what they're supposed to be achieving.
In profit-making ventures, the organisations get overrun by strategic thinking business-school types who spend more time plotting strategy and market position than actually running the fricking company.
Non-profits die like old oak trees: They rot from the inside; they remain standing for far longer than they should, providing shade for a few but hosting an increasing army of parasites.
Profit-making companies die by fire. They remain standing until the first lightning strike, then collapse in flames, sometimes taking half the countryside with them.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Medicare running out of money has nothing to do with whether or not it was a good idea. It is running out of money because of the combination of a baby boom and a poor economy. Even if it single handedly made the baby boom possible, it didn't make it necessary, and so it still was not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, statistics suggest that more, not less, government aid results in better systems.
Another way of looking at it is that Medicare isn't designed to be profitable. The amount of money it can get is determined by law makers who decide how much goes to Medicare and how much goes elsewhere, like say, the military. If the military was running out of money, it wouldn't mean having a military is a bad idea, it would mean we're not funding it enough. It's the same with Medicare.
Meanwhile Big Pharma has let farmers stuff farm animals with antibiotics until resistant bacteria (including old killers like tuberculosis) are a major health problem, while failing to develop new antibiotics. I, like many older people, depend on a couple of drugs to remain healthy and reasonably comfortable, but I believe that the drug industry needs supervision and regulation, just like the banks.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Spending all the income on bonuses to the executives and window dressing, sounds in every way exacly like running it as a business. Running it as a business is what they should move away from, which is why charities dominated by volunteers are so much more efficient.
I think that when most people say a non-profit should be "run like a business", they really just mean that the organization should be setting concrete goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals and evaluating all the organizations actions as they relate to achieving those goals.
No, that's precisely the kind of talk I was objecting to. For one, it leads to insane reporting requirements, often in situations where every hour and every dollar spend doing actual work saves -or at least changes- lives. For another, it leads to a desire for quantifiable metrics, which mean that a ton of really important aspects of development work get left by the wayside, because they can't be easily measured. For yet another, it turns the conversation into a financial one. That's important, sure. Nobody wants their money to be wasted. But it should not be the only topic discussed when evaluating the success of a non-profit.
All too frequently, though, that's precisely what happens when people try to run a non-profit 'like a business.'
I know it sounds whippy-dippy to say that concrete goals are of secondary interest when the real goal is saving lives, but bear with me. As a good friend of mine who worked in disarmament used to say, it's hard to know if you're doing well when you measure your success in terms of the number of people who didn't die. They don't always show up when you're forced to measure your progress in terms of 'concrete goals.'
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good financial controls are essential. We're in screaming agreement on that count. But that's not nearly as big a part of the conversation as you might think when it comes to measuring success in this kind of work.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Call me crazy, but I don't think business should be run like a for-profit business either. That is to say, I don't think people should generally be motivated by, "what's going to generate the most possible profit at the lowest investment over the course of the next quarter."
If you're making a computer OS, then focus on making a kickass computer OS. If you're building hardware, make awesome hardware. Build your business around your business, around doing a good job at the thing your company does, and not around generating short-term profit.
Sure, yes, obviously you need to make a profit. You need to at least break even, or you'll go out of business. But so long as a business is making enough profit to keep their doors open, then in my not-so-humble opinion, they should devote their attention to doing a better job at serving the clients/customers and providing good products, services, and support.
Oh, and yeah, I know. Shareholders, shareholders, bla bla bla. Fuck'em. If we can't run our businesses responsibly because everyone needs to constantly kowtow to the abstract idea of "maximizing investors' profits", then it's time to reevaluate our system of investment.
African and Indian agricultural workers maintain that the Foundation's philanthropy is environmentally toxic , and undermines vital agricultural development that respects local conditions.
This one grabbed my eye, but the article is full of them; I checked the link, and there's no mention of the Melinda Gates Foundation..
Diana Ravich comments on the Gates Foundation's proposed education reforms:
I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.
So she's a teacher who is suspicious of young teachers who don't want to be in unions, and want to be rewarded for performance instead of how long they have been teachers / how many degrees they have?
That's understandable for an elderly teacher with degrees, who is in a powerful union and has many job protections, but there's really no substance to the blog article other than "Gates doesn't know about education".
I also spotted some fear mongering about the initiative to start a "Green Revolution" in Africa (i.e. to bring its farming on par with other places in the word, to reproduce the massive productivity increase it brought in Asia). They talk about affecting the lifestyle of poor farmers, and the risk of genetic patents, but that's a bit narrow-sighted when you're just talking about bringing African agriculture up to standard.
They talk about his investments in blind trusts to sustain the fund, and the way the fund is used to try and lead the way for public money, as if those are bad things. They talk about the use of GlaxoSmithKline to deliver vaccines, reminding us that GSK was recently involved in some scandal, but ignore that drugs and vaccines are what GSK does, and obviously if you want to ramp up production of malaria vaccines you're going to need to involve big pharmaceutical companies.
The whole article seems a bit desperate really.. I'm not sure if it's just a laundry list of vague associations or if it's trying to make some point. Is it questioning Gates' motives? If it is it doesn't make it explicit, it just makes ambiguous jabs.
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No difference at all, right, the two are completely comparable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Saint_Valentine.27s_Day_Massacre
You've pretty much demonstrated why I rarely bother even taking up this subject anymore. Simular thing with republicans when they start comparing democrats to nazis - it blows any chance of reasonable debate out of the water and there's just no point continuing.
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