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Bill Gates's Plan To Improve Our World
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates has written an article in Wired outlining his strategy to improve people's lives through philanthropy and investment in technology and the sciences. He says, 'We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns. That means tackling the world's biggest problems and funding the most likely solutions. That's an even greater challenge than it sounds. I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women. ...I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning to computers. But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor. ... We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.'"
Of course someone who made a lot of money helping a lot of other people make a lot of money helping millions of people have jobs to do. While pissing off the largest portion of the readership here due to quality of the product. I'm pretty sure this isn't going to get a fair shake here on Slashdot.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Religion is just one form of control. Get rid of it, and something else will be used, be it patriotism, racism, drugs, financial ruin or sports.
I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
The argument can be made that capitalism widens the divide between rich and poor. The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure like those seen in Scandinavian countries better address and more quickly narrow the divide.
'We want to give our wealth back to society in a
... BURN THE WITCH!
No, seriously. As a percentage of net earnings, the rich contribute far less as an aggregate group than the poor. There's an inverse relationship between income and charity. The more you make, the less you give, proportionally speaking. You can outline all the reasons why it would be better if this wasn't the case... I doubt you'll find much disagreement here. But making the case for it doesn't mean anyone's going to adopt it; A concept Mr. Gates and the company he used to captain both seem ill-equipped to grasp. Simply understanding the problem better doesn't result in a solution; It is one of the oldest delusions humanity has to offer... that knowledge will lead to action.
Instead, we need to figure out why people give proportionally less, and address the issue within that cognitive framework. And the Just world phenomenon is a great place to start: The belief that you deserve whatever is happening, or has happened, to you. Fundamentally, I think you'll find the reason the rich give less is because on a subconscious level, having adopted the belief that they earned their wealth rather than simply having won a cosmic lottery, they then build on that with confirmation bias. That is, every action that comes after that in some fashion just confirms that they're more deserving than the next guy... and eventually, that makes them not very charitable. Afterall, if I did it, you can do it, right? It's such a basic failure of reasoning that entire books have been written on the subject, and yet... here we are... still not getting it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Nothing is ever that simple and any attempt to boil something so vast down to a single word, no matter how far reaching, is naive. Religions exists because of various human needs, and people believe because of various needs. It can enrich lives or impoverish them. It can motivate, or demotivate. It can create and destroy. Help and Harm. Like anything manmade it can be used for peace, and for war.
Terrible acts done in the name of religion are symptoms of deeper, more intertwined problems in how we relate to one another, terrible teachings symptomatic of human needs for order, control, and normalcy. Absence of religion would not simply make the world a better place on it's own, something else would take the place, both good and bad, that religion serves . "If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him"
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
In the old days when this was a small town calling itself a city, I'd frequently be at a play with Bill or some other event.
I like his focus on where we need to fix it, but the cold hard fact is he lives in an area where the ultra-rich are taxed much less than the poor, and he goes to great lengths not to pay taxes on many levels.
Capitalism is no problem - but Adam Smith, the Father of Capitalism, railed against Mercantalism that Bill worships at the head of.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I know a lot of people are going to downvote the hell out of this, but it is a sad truth.
A lot of the countries that suffer from these problems have a hugely corrupt religious following throughout them, or many warring religions.
And often times these groups have a pyramid approach where the "more important" people get most of anything and the "poor peasant turds" get the scraps. I remember we got past that corruption of nobility nonsense back in the stupid ages.
Religion itself is not bad, but without regulation it is.
And with time, that also gets out of control so trying to regulate it is GOING to straight up require hostile action, regardless.
It is a tragic world we live in. People like to pretend we are in an age of enlightenment, are we fuck, we are still baby steps at best. It is just like those morons that think humanity is in the space age, NOPE, that is like saying the iron age started when some dude tripped over some ferrite. Not how it works, sorry. Humanity is at best in the baby steps towards an actual space age. Come back in maybe 100 years if we don't blow ourselves up over fossils, again.
Well, maaaaybe 50 if these space mining operations actually do come about. Planetary Resources actually did have a really huge and so far pretty efficient schedule from what I remember reading recently, they are already sticking to plans more-or-less. I can't WAIT to be a space pir--trucker.
Most of the hate for Microsoft was due to their monopoly status; not so much anymore. That monopoly let them sit on their laurels and collect money without needing to produce the best product quality. Today, MS the _underdog_ in a lot of hugely important markets. Furthermore, Gates is only a Chairman at MS anymore and has little or nothing to do with day to day operations. He's spent a an enormous amount of time, effort, and money sincerely trying (and in many cases succeeding) to make things a little better for humans everywhere. People need to let go of the hate, it's no longer useful in this context.
Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people with religion == Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people without religion.
Religion is almost never the driving factor. In the absence of religion, such people would have found other means and justifications to perpetrate their evil. There are many such examples in history.
Unfortunately, the castigation of religion often reveals a hatred of religion more than a hatred of the evil acts.
This is worth a read:
http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/
TL;DR
Gates's and others' philanthropy prolongs poverty by sowing as it does the seed of more inequality (in Gates's case, through the formation of health policies in the third world that make it easier for Western drug companies to open up markets for treatments there). They give away the fruit, but never the trees.
As Oscar Wilde observed of the philanthropists of his era: ‘They seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.’ Then and now, as Wilde said, ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.’
This is really the question that needs to be addressed: why is poverty still possible - and why can it even get worse - after 200 years of Gates's capitalism? Surely by now if capitalism was the answer, we'd not be where we are today.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Wrong, the problem today is corruption and people accepting corruption as the normal. Our current shitty state of the union is not due to any Religion, it's due to corrupt people in power. The only thing mentioning Religion does is to show that religion is not above or beyond being corrupted.
Fact: The Catholic Church never taught people that pedophilia was correct, or good, or just. In fact they taught (and teach) their followers that it was bad, illegal, and that they would spend the rest of their lives in hell if they were to commit these acts. Meanwhile a bunch of corrupt leaders sat in a back room committing the crimes or covering up for those that did. That's not "Religion", that is "Corruption".
As long as you have biases and bigotry it's hard to see where the real problems are. While you bitch about "Religion A" being bad, the same corrupt fuckers are sitting behind a corrupted government, doing the same corrupt things. They laugh at how ignorant the masses are, and how easily they are fooled by bullshit propaganda.
"The Noble Lie" is not something that only "Good" can use, it's also something that corrupt evil people use.
Oh, and Bill Gates is corrupt lying fuck that I would not trust with my used toilet paper, let alone tell us what changes we need to make in the world or what sciences we should be studying.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I know a lot of people are going to downvote the hell out of this, but it is a sad truth.
Did you forget what site you are on? This is Slashdot, any pro atheist comment gets +5 informative/insightful and anything discussing not just a Religion, but contemplation of a "Creator" gets you -234 Flamebait/Troll.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Greed. Which is, of course, based on fear, which, is, of course, the penalty of human awareness. Unregulated capitalism certainly equals any other system in terms of global destruction and hardship for the people at the bottom. The greediest and most psychopathic people rise to the top of any unregulated system.
Someone forgot to tell Bain Capital.
I personally know someone who worked for a mid-sized IT firm out of Texas. They were small but growing and successful. Then Bain Capital stepped in, waived some money around and purchased the company. The day after the deal was finalized, everyone was fired and the company was liquidized - sold of bit by bit. The poor lady is now in the Mid-West working in a call center.
Capitalism for the wider interests my ass. When the wider interests are served, it's incidental. Capitalists only care about the 99% when it means making more money off of them, and they wouldn't serve the wider interests if they didn't have to. Granted, they often do, but it's not because they are on the moral high ground. Perhaps Bill Gates really truly is trying to say that the evils of capitalism truly equal good for the people, but I don't think that makes it a good system - it's open to mutation and a future where we see the raw, unabashed, exploitation of the people. Like I said, it's incidental. We are carefully watching the US government become dystopian, while corporations are more quietly doing the same. Bill gates might be a true philanthropist, but he is nearly alone in his level of giving and is kidding himself if he believes all capitalists have the greater good or wider interests at heart.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
'We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns.
Well, Mr. Gates, here's how:
Don't take away their wealth in the first place.
It's well-established fact that the poor make the best use of money. There is less waste and more immediate progress than with any organisation or institute. Micro-credits are a blasting success wherever they are granted in the interest of helping people. (they fail when the same banks that caused the housing bubble/burst get in on the game hoping to make a quick buck, because they don't screen the applicants).
Monopoly rent is known to damage the economy disproportionately. For every $ you give to charity now, Mr. Gates, you've already taken two away.
"Don't be a greedy bastard." is a much, much better formula for helping other people than giving away even most of your money. Because it's not a zero-sum game, it's not just redistribution of wealth, the 1% gain most of their wealth not just by taking it from the rest, but by causing damage in excess of their profit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Microsoft screws many of us over on a regular basis.
Much as I hate having to use Microsoft products, I don't feel too sorry for myself compared to people living with endemic malaria.
Most insightful comment today.
After the way he "improved" my computing experience over the last few decades, I will take my chances without his plan.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Depends. The majority of Slashdot? The majority of the World? The majority of the US? I have no confidence that the majority of Slashdot is atheist, but the mod system ensures that people rarely speak of Religion or creation. If you are talking about the majority of the population, the majority is Religious in one form or another.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
1. statistically, poor people likely to have a lot kids, whether religous or not. well off people do not, whether religous or not. most well off people in first world countries have a religion, but they don't even have enough kids to maintain population
2. people do what they want and justify it whether they have religion or not, it's human nature
3. Many religions have hard work and self-improvement as commandment
4. Atheists also engage in crazy talk and actions, and have even outdone Hitler in body count on at least two occasions
5. Science, engineering, medicine, psychology and philosphy have been used as basic for being self-righteous just as much as religion
Humans are troublesome creatures, the problems will persist with and without religion
Jeezus Bill, if both you and Warren Buffet really want to make the greatest impact on humanity, use every cent of your wealth to establish a global free press foundation beholden to no person or government. Only via this method can humankind be as sure as is humanly possible that we're getting an unbiased view. Fund a Free Press Foundation now!
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Religion is just one form of control.
In world history and human behavior, religion provided a common moral framework which allowed a society to retain some level of stability as it grew in size. A large society without any common moral framework will become increasingly domestically unstable, and ultimately become ungovernable as a single sovereign entity without a civil war & mass slaughter if nothing changes.
Of course, religion has also been used by tyrants to create fanatics and spark wars. But the fact remains that the beginnings of early civilization would never have succeeded in attaining any long term stability without religion. The Magna Carta and Western ideas of natural rights were based upon tenets taken from Christianity.
People in general in large societies need to have a spiritual faith in something larger than themselves and belief in a core set of moral standards to give them spiritual strength, sense of mercy and charity, and restraint in their negative animal impulses and temptations.
The more civil, kind, and peaceful the population is on it's own without coercion by force, the more individual freedom that can exist, and a common moral framework is essential. Technically, I suppose if there were some other *equally effective and voluntarily as attractive/popular* non-religious societal moral framework, it could take the place of religion, but I know of none that can adequately meet all those essential requirements.
So far, there has never been a society that had Atheism as one of it's tenets that didn't end up a totalitarian hellhole that killed millions and horrified the world at large. There has also been any number of horrible societies/nations that are/have been fanatically religious, or more realistically, have had a group of leaders who use/used certain selected parts of religions to create fanatical supporters/fighters, like Christian fanatics during the Crusades and the current attacks by religious-fanatic Islamic extremists.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Atheism is not a "tenet". It is simply the lack of faith in the supernatural.
There are quite a few irreligious societies, in fact if not in name, that are doing quite well -- the Japanese, for instance, and some European countries (~20% religious).
All of us know that whosoever dares criticise the "free market" in any form or way whatsoever in front of a US audience will automatically be branded a 'Bleeding Heart Liberal', a 'Socialist', if not 'Communist' by that same audience (depending on their mood and how threatened they feel) without further investigation of what he actually has to say.
Practically the only way a US audience will pause long enough to actually listen is to bring impeccable credentials as a 'Capitalist' and to start off by clear endorsements of Capitalism in general. Only then is it considered acceptable to point out one or two weaknesses or deficiencies of the system and suggest improvements.
This is what Bill Gates has done, and he's one of the few people alive who can not only say something like that and still be listened to, but who *wants* to point anything like that out to the world. I guess that Warren Buffet is another, but I wouldn't know many others. That's why he said that.
And please note that the quality of MS software or its competitive practices have no bearing on the issue.
Capitalism is all about maximizing profit, so using the world's IQ toward devising solutions for people who cannot afford to buy products is a horrible capitalist strategy. It's taking resources that could be spent on maximizing profits by developing products for more profitable demographics and shifting them towards something systemically unprofitable. I'm not trying to take anything away from the hard work that Bill is doing - he seems determined to use his money to make the world a better place, but I can't help but see some cognitive dissonance going on in his defense of capitalism.
It's hard for me to see Bill Gates beyond being a spoiled, insecure boy. He talks about all these grand visions (The Road Ahead, et al) yet clearly is out of touch with the real world and the realities of human nature to the point that he dreams up these fanciful dreams of utopia that only get taken seriously because he happens to be insanely rich. It's hard for me to see Bill Gates as machiavellian or otherwise diabolical (not that he doesn't throw a good capitalist tantrum now and again), because he's so clearly scared of being caught for what he isn't -- a man in charge of his own fate. He can't possibly be able to imagine living a life not saddled to his silver, free to be bold like many of the "not haves". If he were to no longer "have", then he'd lose the very thing that defines him -- massive wealth. His ego must be terrified at the idea that he is nothing more than paper and ink.
So he props up these grand visions and philanthropic ventures as a way to give validation to his existence, never manning up to working out his own inner deficiencies. And since he lacks the real world understanding to do so himself, he allies with Warren Buffet types to guide him on what he should do, swallowing completely their belief in the supremacy of the capitalist ethos. But his "plans to improve our world" always come off as childish and unworkable. Indeed, can anyone here enumerate the number of grand plans Bill Gates has put forth that have fulfilled their objectives in improving our world? (that's an honest question, by the way)
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
Like it or not, the thing that atheism has in common with religion is that both are belief systems.
Does your brain hurt when you try to formulate a sentence to justify garbage like that?
READ MY LIPS. Being skeptical of weird stuff is not a "belief system" just a rational mind doing its work.
Not falling for supernatural scams is not a "lack of faith", it's not a lack of anything, just a rational mind doing its work.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I was getting a better opinion about Bill Gates with his charitable efforts and then he went and created InBloom (along with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp). For those who don't know, InBloom was created to help school districts manage data. To that end, they are collecting hundreds of data points on students. Examples include home addresses, SSN, medial diagnoses (autism/deafness/emotional disturbance), whether they were disciplined and how much including any jail time, and whether the student gets pregnant. To make matters worse, they are storing it in the cloud. (We all know cloud storage is 100% secure, right?) Not only don't they need parental approval (the law governing schools protecting student information was amended to allow the schools to participate), but parents can't even opt out. Yes, if you have kids in Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or New York, your childs' information may already be in the cloud.
Thanks, Gates for seriously compromising my son's personal information and leaving me nearly powerless to stop it. (I can protest, but the politicians here have all drunk large amounts of InBloom Kool-Aid and think us parents are just annoying pests to be ignored.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
While you've been exceptionally polite about just how right you are, I somehow can't feel too bad pointing out a small flaw in your reasoning. The method of calculating his adjusted wealth used there is percentage of GDP, not standard adjusted dollars. In regular old adjusted dollars, his net worth, when he had $1.5 billion sometime around 1930 was about $21 billion. It actually goes up if you go back a bit, but it never goes up above about $25 billion in adjusted dollars. If you think about that in terms of wages, a job that roughly equates to a minimum wage job in 1914 would be 50 cents per hour. Map that to a modern $8.00 an hour job and you're looking at about a 16 times increase, so that pretty much puts Rockerfeller's wealth, relative to the average working stiff of his time, in the neighborhood of a modern billionaire with something like $20 to $30 billion.
The percentage of GDP theory is an interesting one, but it isn't a realistic way of comparing wealth across a century of time. The problem is that you're basically saying that a big 10 kg fish in a small pond is bigger than a 20 kg fish in the ocean beause one is in a small pond and the other is in the ocean. Would rockerfeller have been richer if he had the same wealth and moved to a country with a smaller GDP (but the same or higher gdp per capita)? Would he have been poorer if he moved to a country with a larger GDP (but, once again, the same GDP per capita)?