Bill Gates To Stanford Grads: Don't (Only) Focus On Profit

jfruh (300774) writes "The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems."

Comments

Also focus on

[Anonymous Coward]

Destroying your enemies.

Re:Also focus on

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You don't have to "destroy" them, just "cut off their air supply".

Re:Also focus on

[binarylarry]

As well as hearing the lamentation of their women.

Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems

That's because it causes most of them.

Re:Water is wet

[blue trane]

Kleinrock and others have explicitly said that economic gain was not a motivation for the beginnings of the internet. And Berners-Lee wasn't interested in profiting from the World Wide Web. How much did Mendel profit from his theory of inheritance? Why didn't Pasteur pursue profits instead of basic research? Were Watson and Crick thinking of money when they thought of the double helix structure of DNA?

Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.

Re:Water is wet

[ArmoredDragon]

The problem is you have to compare the internet before it was profit driven against after it was profit driven. Sure, the TCP/IP suite is good and all, but without an underlying infrastructure it's kind of useless. That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.

A few things to take into consideration:

1) The original e-mail SMTP implementation was designed under the assumption that it could very well take multiple days to deliver an email. This is because the internet was mostly volunteer driven, and some links weren't open until the volunteers took the time to make them available. (Otherwise why even have SMTP? Why not just send your email directly from your client to the destination server? Keep in mind the spam problem didn't exist back then, so there were no anti-spam motivations for doing so, rather it was purely due to what was a discontiguous internet.) It wasn't until there was a profit motive of an ISP to provide "always on" peering arrangements.

2) Recall numerous times when those behind it said that the original design was never intended to be as big as it is now. That is because before there was big money to be made, most WAN links were pretty damn slow. Where we now have Frame Relay and ATM, there used to be X.25

3) Completely state of the art WAN equipment is hugely profit driven. HFC traders are well known to have some of the fastest and by far the most reliable links that they (not governments, not nonprofits or volunteers) commissioned to be built, which they also lease to other third parties (although these third parties get lower priority QoS, they still benefit from overall faster communication than had they used other links.) Some of the most state of the art networking equipment is also profit driven (like them or not, Cisco has done a HUGE service to the internet with all of the contributions they've made to networking on well more than one occasion, and they're very profit driven. They also provide emergency volunteer services as well though, see Cisco's TacOps team.)

4) You think the Emerald Express transatlantic cable would be under construction by purely volunteers? Look at the kind of work required to build that.

Re:Water is wet

[Immerman]

If you work for money you have my sympathies, perhaps you should re-evaluate your assumptions.

There is the option, especially prevalent within academia, of working for your pleasure. You still make money, and have to deal with financing, but it's not the point - if you weren't getting pay you'd make money elsewhere and then want to do the same work out of your own pocket as a hobby. Because the work is it's own reward.

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it. Make your choices carefully. Or at least consciously. Don't let yourself become a cogg in the machine whose life has been optimized to serve the economy.

Re:Water is wet

[Immerman]

The problem is that very *very* many people believe that having more money will make them happier - it's a belief that our culture instills in many subtle ways the entire time you're growing up, and gets reinforced by virtually every piece of advertising we see - a media form largely dedicated to generating a previously non-existent or negligible desire, with the implicit promise that sating that desire by giving Company X your money for their product/service will make you happier.

And it's completely false, as evidenced by a huge amount of psychological research around the world. Once you have shelter and plenty of food it doesn't actually have much impact on happiness whether you're eating beans and rice in a comfortable hovel or caviar in a mansion - other factors that have very little to do with money become the dominant factors in your happiness: things like close friendships, job satisfaction, and stress levels. All things that an unpleasant job can have serious negative impacts on. Income becomes relevant to happiness only insofar as your income compares to your peers - so long as you're not considerably less wealthy than your friends your income will have negligible impact on your happiness.

The evidences shows that we're virtually all really bad about judging beforehand what will make us happy, and rarely question our underlying assumptions. Meanwhile our culture is saturated with indoctrinating influences that tell a story soundly disproven by science. In such an environment I believe we have an ethical duty to point out the lies we're being told about ourselves, and encourage people to ask themselves what really matters in their life: what do you already do, today, that makes you happy, and why are you neglecting that in order to make more money to buy things that almost certainly won't make you the slightest bit happier after the initial rush of acquisition has passed?

If even one person reads these posts and decides they should spend a little more time with their friends and family appreciating the simple joys in life, instead of working overtime at a job they dislike so they can buy a nicer car/bigger house/newer TV/etc, then the total amount of happiness in the world is increased. And I for one think that's a worthy cause to fight for.

So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

Cartoon lightening should hit gates in his weedy little head. What a hilarious hypocrite.

Tell you what, Gates... after I hit 70 billion I'll stop making it all about the money too. What a giant joke.

Yes, gates does a lot of very nice charity work around the world... and that's lovely. But he didn't just hop on a couch airplane and then do relief work in africa for years. The man amassed an insane fortune and then casually jet sets around the world making appearences for his charities. Don't get me wrong... he writes checks that clear. But that's his contribution to all these issues... writing checks. And that's very important... but to do that you have to have money. If you don't you can't do that.

So... I'm a little confused about his message. Because if I judged him by his actions... the sensible thing would seem to be... make billions of dollars by any means and then retire to run various charities and tell people what a good person you've always been.

I don't know... this charity kick that some of the super rich go off on seems like more of a donation to the "Everyone love me" fund. I frankly respect the anonymous donations more in most cases simply because you know they actually care more about the cause then they do about what people think of them.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[flaming error]

Or maybe he started out with a ruthless bloodlust for destroying all competitors and slowly grew up. And retired and tried to do something useful.

And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.

Hey, it could happen. Maybe.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Tom]

And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.

Negative on that. He runs his charity much like he ran MS. In fact, several other charities are complaining how he's driving out the "competition" - which even though it's not about profits does have the same result we all know from MS: A lot of the aid programs now depend on his foundation in one way or the other. Especially in his most public work against malaria, he's made the pharma companies he works with near monopolies (and, surprise, he owns stock in them).

He's doing good now, but his methods are still the same.

A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[quietwalker]

Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.

Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.

Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.

So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.

The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.

Except when profit actively undermines charity

[RobinEggs]

The process of earning your profit can easily counteract the effects of spending your profit on charity, however. The wealthy often realize this paradox when they begin "giving back". The Gates Foundation itself has been accused many times of investing in things that completely undermine its goals. This editorial from 2014 is just one example.; I recall hearing similar claims about investments in totally different industries almost 10 years ago

How you get your profit makes a big difference in what net accomplishments your money can achieve. If your earning provides great support to systems that keep poor countries unstable or work against universal improvements for humanity, but then you wish to spend your profits on humanist goals, then what was the point? I'd rather you'd just become a janitor instead of digging holes in human society and then desperately filling them back in, hoping you might create mountains in the process.

honest profit

[stenvar]

The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.

As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.

Re:Fuck the world

[Immerman]

640 Megabucks should be enough for anyone.

It's actually very common.

[Anonymous Coward]

As people get older they experience death anxiety. People who spent their lives accepting death as inevitable and believing they had come to terms with it discover the reality of existential crisis once the reality of death begins to draw near.

A very common reaction to this is a rapid shift of values. People who spent most of their lives seeking some form of hedonism start to want meaning in their lives instead. They want to make up for lost time, too.

Lots of rich robber-barons became philanthropists near the end of their lives. Bill Gates is just another character in that same story.

The next generation of young-ins will be just as greedy as the previous, despite these admonitions from their elders. That's just how it works.

People are more altruistic than you think

[Camael]

bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way

Untrue. And unlike you, I have citations and links to prove it.

You might have heard of Edward Jenner , father of immunology and the man whose work in vaccination reduced smallpox from a feared fatal disease to a mere footnote today. Did he become rich from it? No. He sacrificed his own practice and in the end had to be bailed out with public funds.

Jenner's continuing work on vaccination prevented him continuing his ordinary medical practice. He was supported by his colleagues and the King in petitioning Parliament, and was granted £10,000 for his work on vaccination. In 1806, he was granted another £20,000 for his continuing work in microbiology.

Or we can look at Louis Pasteur, father of microbiology. He

...was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, and his discoveries have saved countless lives ever since.

What was was the motivation for his work?

After serving briefly as professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849, and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood; the other three died of typhoid. These personal tragedies were his motivations for curing infectious diseases.

You may be cynical and personally driven by profit-seeking, but don't assume everyone else is.

Re:People are more altruistic than you think

[nukenerd]

Your little list can be easily trumped by Thomas Edison alone...

The context was human life and health. Edison was in the world of science and technology. In any case it was Edison's unsung underlings who made most of the advances. For other science examples, do you seriously think that the likes of Newton, Bacon, Galileo and Einstein were motivated by profit?

We need to distinguish between profit and salary. Many scientists and medical pioneers want a comfortable, or at least a livable, salary if only so that they can concentrate on what they like doing. Newton had his allowance as a Cambridge professor, and was later rewarded by the post of Master of the Royal Mint. But he did not make his discoveries so that he could become Master of the Mint. In fact he lived like a monk. Francis Bacon, as Lord Chancellor of England, was already a very wealthy man yet took an interest in science as a hobby, such that he was the founder of the modern scientific method. Bacon certainly did not look or expect any profit from his scienctific work - he did not need it.

Re:[need YMMV]

[Lotana]

Have a look at the post you replied to:

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it.

Please point to the part where you came up with "lovey dovey feel good philosophy doesn't pay the bills" from? That is an absolutely true statement. Once you have enough money to cover your needs (Needs depend very heavily on your expectations and accepted standard of living), there is no improvement to your quality of life. You do not require to be rich to have financial security to do what you love.

You think widget makers in the widget factory want to build widgets in their off time?

Absolutely!

My father is a cabinet maker. He spends all his working hours working on the factory floor and he is not rich in any sense of a word. However at home he has a shed with a work bench, wood and a hell of a lot of tools. After he comes home he makes stuff just for the pleasure of it. All our friends got custom chairs/tables/drawers/bookshelves that he built out of his own time and money just for fun and a thank you.

My grandfather was a plumber. For his whole life if any of his friends had issues in their home he would fix it up for free. I can assure you, he wasn't rich either.

There is so much more to life than money! Do you think that every single volunteer out there is rich?

Nope, Gates still uses the MSFT business approach

[HannethCom]

They have very strict rules for "giving" money.

First off, Gates only contributes as much money to the foundation as can be written off.

He "generously" gives to school districts. In exchange the school must only use Microsoft products. We will pay for the computers and initial licenses, but then you get locked into an agreement to pay Microsoft Licensing Fees, which means the Gates Melinda Foundation will pay %40 of the cost, and the schools have to pick up the back end 60% in a few years time. Gates still has substantial shares in Microsoft.

Some places they have built water treatment plants to treat the water that has been polluted by the factory built up the river. In quite a few of the cases, the factory built up the river was made by a company with investment money from the Gates Melinda Foundation.

They have also developed Common Core, to teach English and Math in the way that Bill Gates thinks it should be taught. Adopted in 46 states so far partially due to the $76 million to help adopt their philosophy. Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point instead of Shakespeare. Freakonomics instead of Poe. Bill and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the future through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives. Regardless if you agree with this or not, the "charity" is making sure with its money, this is what your children are being taught.

surprised?

[Tom]

Anyone surprised?

Gates has been on a campaign to whitewash his image for many years now. He probably realized that he has more money than he can ever spend in his lifetime, even if he sleeps on a bed of dollar bills ever day - and burns it in the morning.

But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag. So he did what all the robber barons have done before him, he turned to philantropy and creating a nice new image of himself, hoping that ten years from now people will remember that part of his life and forget the other.

And it just might work, because humans in general are stupid. Too few realize that since he made most of his fortune extracting economic rent, the damage he has done to society is larger than the money he has, so no matter what he does, if he wants to become a net positive for the human race, he has to do a lot more than just give away his wealth.

Re:[need YMMV]

[Lotana]

Perhaps my examples are not the best. Plumbers and cabinet makers are professions that pay well eventually. The point I was trying to make that people do indeed spend their free time doing thing what they do for a job.

Stating that craftsman do not work for money (and its benefits) is ridiculous.

This is the part that I just don't understand where both you and the grandparent post got from.This whole thread is about working for pleasure ONCE the income from that activity covers the cost of living. Again the quote from the original post is: "Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head". Quote from the post above that is: "Yes, I work in imaging research, trying to bring about medical imaging progress, with hopefully useful results. I'm not at all motivated by profit. I just want enough money not to starve and enough funding to pay my students and equipment." (Emphasis mine).

No one that I can see has stated in this thread that anyone works for absolute free. We do not dispute that! Your bills needs to be covered first. But beyond covering your needs, profit need not be the motivation!

For example: You have a choice to stay doing a job you love, but only covers your expenses or do what you don't like, but earn triple the amount that you need. In BOTH cases you are NOT working for free! In BOTH cases your living expenses are covered.

What this thread is about is that choosing the former is better for your quality of life than the latter. This is the interesting and complex part that is being discussed. Not simplified "Be a hippy to be happy!" nonsense that you are reading into the discussion.