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."
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases, on people from nations who will grow up to use pirated software. No wonder the scumbag stakeholders are pissed.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
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.
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.
Not me. I've voiced my concerns that are not so warmly received.
The short of it is that I think what Gates is doing is great but I don't understand why they buy research facilities in America and not Africa or why all the drug companies that get to sell their cures to Africa are all American. I mean without stability, roads and other infrastructure, Africa is going to constantly need someone else to fix their problems. And the money from the B&G Foundation stays in America invested in American companies that pays out to American companies that provide "cures" for Africa. It will perpetually work that way.
Imagine aliens landed on Earth, took an assessment of us and were saddened to see war, pollution, poverty, etc. So they say they're going to help us and they buy 10 long range matter transmitters from another alien race and give them to Earth. But if we ask them on how to make the transmitters ourselves they just laugh and say "Please, you're still searching for subatomic particles. Plus, you're just going to use them for war if you can make them. And on top of that, you would have to pay sums you cannot fathom to the alien race who invented these machines. When these break, we'll get you some new ones." Meanwhile they're receiving accolades from the galactic senate and Earth remains full of war, pollution, poverty, etc.
It's a horrible truth but the one thing Africa has a lot of is humans. Life is cheap there. If you want to reverse that, you need to introduce stability and then farming and then commerce. There are huge areas where crime, corruption and warlords make it impossible to raise crops. Curing malaria is important but it isn't going to stop that from being the hungriest place on Earth. And it's not going to raise the value of human life there. Gates' idea to fix that is to pair up with Monsanto (surprise another American company with tons of IP). Right. I wonder if they'll patent the seeds they breed that grow well in regions of Africa?
Just like thinking up a new microfinancing system can win you a Nobel Prize, ideas on how to make areas secure and stable will go much further for farming in Africa than importing Monsanto seed with terminator genes.
My work here is dung.
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.
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*
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
Well I DID read TFA and basically its just the word "foundation" wrapped around a lobbying group. Surprise surprise, rich people that reach the level of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are greedy self serving douchebags, news at 11.
I mean who didn't know that? while I'll give him credit for using what must be a ripped off copy of Job's old RDF when it came to the foundation, seriously guys, who did NOT know the uber rich are greedy soulless self serving douchebags? You see those of us that DO have a soul, and thus a conscience, couldn't actually stomach sitting on billions of dollars while knowing the guy down the street is praying his 92 Dodge stuck on the side of the road will start because if it don't and he misses a day of work he's gonna be homeless, we just couldn't do it.
Hell I'm not rich by ANY means yet I've given away more computers and more of my time than I could ever count, and not taken a cent off of anything because that is not what it was for it was for making someone else's life a little bit better, for helping some single mom or as I've been doing with the guy downstairs helping a guy who has nothing become computer literate. Has someone like Gates EVER invited someone who had no place to go into his home for Xmas dinner? I doubt it,and before anyone asks yes I have, but I didn't do it for any type of credit or recognition, I did it because it was the right thing to do.
So while I'm glad the RDF is starting to fail on the foundation I'm frankly not surprised its a greedy self serving foundation because i have yet to see a single one of the billionaires that aren't just as I described, more sociopath than normal person by a LONG shot. Hell Jobs fucked over Woz with the Atari sale and he was supposed to be Jobs best friend and without him he would have never had a company, I'm sure if you looked into Gates and Ellison you'd find just as many cases of them royally fucking over people that were honestly trying to be friendly and help them when they were starting out. The pure unadulterated greed required to get to that level, to truly be one of the 1%, just requires a viciousness that most of us thankfully do not possess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
Never say never, son.
A few years ago, Xanana Gusmao, the Prime Minister of Timor Leste was facing a crisis. As a result of the violence leading up to Timor's first free elections, almost 10% of the country (over 100,000 people) ended up in refugee camps. He asked the UN and other aid agencies for advice, and they came up with an 8 year plan at the end of which, the first houses would be built.
The PM immediately ordered cash payments to all internally displaced people to help them rebuild their homes. It was a partial answer, one that the government admitted would require significant further effort, but the move helped 60,000 people to begin rebuilding within a year.
The aid agencies went apeshit. They told him that the money would be wasted, stolen, spent on the wrong things, that there would be no way to measure the success, that they wouldn't be able to avoid fraud.... But Xanana insisted. Within two years, the camps were empty.
In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Nobody wants to live in a camp. The money each person received wasn't enough to build a house, but it was enough to get started. And that's all the encouragement people need.
William Easterly's Aid Watch blog also documents studies tracking how direct cash donations to displaced persons in sub-Saharan Africa were used. They found that less than 10% of the money was wasted or somehow misused. That's better than just about every other form of aid in terms of efficiency.
The moral of the story, therefore, is not that giving money is bad. The moral is that you need to give it to people with the reason and motivation to use it for the right things. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of multi-national corporations lack that motivation.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
Actually, one of the characteristics of Mr. Gates's charity is that this will not happen.
Gates's position is that while this sounds good, what you end up with is a charity that exists to function like a business. And then, like a business (let's take Microsoft for example), you end up with an organization that's weighed down with layers of middle managers, most of whose chief priority is to keep the business (charity) running -- not to achieve its goals, but to protect their own jobs.
Gates rejected that model. Instead his charity has a mandate that it must spend ALL of its money by XYZ date. After that date, the Gates Foundation will be broke, and it will disappear. Personally I admire this decision.
Breakfast served all day!
Hmm....
Let's let Monsanto go for a bit - I would just point out that few things are purely good or evil, the world is much more complicated.
However, the vaccine business is clearly not a win for the 'free market'. The early vaccines were not developed by drug companies, they were developed by universities. Even the measles vaccine which was in part developed by the person who started Merck was employed in a government funded lab.
Vaccines make so little money and are so hard to produce that the US government had to write special legislation to entice Big Pharma into making them. That legislation shows just what a mess things are in the US at present. But I think it is quite reasonable to rage at Big Pharma while simultaneously trying to get them to behave in a socially responsible manner.
And the Gates Foundation is an example of this. They certainly do some good, but their structure is really set up to benefit large Western organizations, some governmental, some non governmental. Read up on the machinations of the International Monetary Fund some time. Take some generic anti nausea medication first.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.