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'No Such Thing As a Free Gift' Casts a Critical Eye At Gates Foundation (theintercept.com)
theodp writes: The Intercept's Michael Massing takes a look at "How the Gates Foundation Reflects the Good and the Bad of 'Hacker Philanthropy." He writes, "Despite its impact, few book-length assessments of the foundation's work have appeared. Now Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Essex, is seeking to fill the gap. 'Just how efficient is Gates's philanthropic spending?' she asks in No Such Thing as a Free Gift. 'Are the billions he has spent on U.S. primary and secondary schools improving education outcomes? Are global health grants directed at the largest health killers? Is the Gates Foundation improving access to affordable medicines, or are patent rights taking priority over human rights?' As the title of her book suggests, McGoey answers all of these questions in the negative. The good the foundation has done, she believes, is far outweighed by the harm." Massing adds, "Bill and Melinda Gates answer to no electorate, board, or shareholders; they are accountable mainly to themselves. What's more, the many millions of dollars the foundation has bestowed on nonprofits and news organizations has led to a natural reluctance on their part to criticize it. There's even a name for it: the 'Bill Chill' effect."
Bill should have just kept all the lucre. Then there would be nothing to criticize.
Maybe they can do much more good without jumping through the bureaucratic hoops. It's their money. Why do they need to account to Linsey McGoey for the way they spend it?
Like all these so called 'philanthropic' organisations they are designed primarily as a tax-free haven for their cash pile. Secondly, they are there to promote drugs and get people dependant on aid that makes many companies a significant amount of money. It's amazing what you can get away with under the guise of 'charity', which is why every sportsman and woman, and their dogs seem to have one.
"Bill and Melinda Gates answer to no electorate, board, or shareholders; they are accountable mainly to themselves."
What makes anyone think they have a right to an accounting?
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The government run school systems and aid agencies have to account for how the money is effecting them.
Also, Linsey McGoey is fully in her rights to critique how they spend it.
"Bill and Melinda Gates answer to no electorate, board, or shareholders"
Yeah, because elected officials are primarily worried about what happens in other jurisdictions rather than their own. And boards and shareholders are all about the betterment of humanity, not company profit. And I ride to work on my unicorn stallion named Fabio to impress the ladies.
Even if she listed some sort of credible source of accountability, what does it prove that they don't have one? What did she claim or cite that indicates that the effects have been actually bad?
The same is true when it comes to the foundation’s work in public health. As McGoey briefly acknowledges, the foundation’s investment of more than $15 billion in this field “has done considerable good.” That seems an understatement. Thanks in part to the Gateses’ strong investment in vaccines for infectious diseases, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000. Over the last quarter century, tuberculosis mortality worldwide has fallen by 45 percent, while over the last dozen years the number of new malaria cases has dropped by 30 percent. And polio, which in 1988 was endemic in 125 countries, is today endemic in only two. The foundation has also played an important part in fighting the spread of HIV and helping those infected with the virus to lead productive lives. For this, Bill and Melinda Gates deserve much credit.
So far so good.
The question is, has this been the best use of their money? As McGoey notes, chronic diseases, as opposed to communicable ones, exact a staggering toll worldwide, yet the foundation has invested less than 4 percent of its funding in research on them, and the global health community has largely followed suit. “The failure to combat obesity, cancer and heart disease epidemics in poor nations,” she observes, “has been one of the most glaring mistakes of global development efforts in recent years.” An equally serious shortcoming has been the neglect of primary-care facilities in the developing world. The initial problems that the nations of West Africa faced in combating the Ebola outbreak stemmed in part from the weaknesses in their overall health systems. Interestingly, in late September, the Gates Foundation, together with WHO and the World Bank, announced a joint partnership aimed at improving access to primary care in poor and middle-income countries — a dramatic (if tacit) acknowledgement that the emphasis on fighting individual diseases has been too narrow.
The primary reason it makes sense to focus on infectious diseases is that once they are gone, they are completely gone. Obesity and other problems don't go away permanently. In contrast if we wipe out malaria or polio, we won't have to deal with it again.
Note also that every single one of the other major criticisms acknowledges that it is something that the Gates have changed already. For example, the article discusses how a number of the Foundation's early attempts at education reform didn't work well. But they changed what they were doing. So they are already using effective evaluations and metrics to decide things.
I find it deeply unfortunate that someone spent an entire book criticizing the Gates Foundation when there are far more clear cut wastes of money out there. The Make a Wish Foundation is an example. They spent 58 million dollars last year http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.programs&orgid=4038#.VljSXnsyH3U and millions more came from businesses in parts of wishes to help a tiny number of dying children, whereas if that money was spent effectively on cancer research, there would be fewer children dying. Instead we have an entire book focusing on one of the most effective and efficient charities in on the planet which complains that they aren't efficient enough.
It always has strings attached.
Money provided for:
education - only Microsoft software used.
medical - buy only from specific companies or research is still owned by the companies...
As far as is visible, they are just an extension of Microsoft, but without taxes.
Well written and insightful article. Well worth the read.
The government run school systems and aid agencies have to account for how the money is effecting them.
It seems the Gates Foundation didn't fund your school enough.
It always has strings attached.
Money provided for:
education - only Microsoft software used.
medical - buy only from specific companies or research is still owned by the companies...
As far as is visible, they are just an extension of Microsoft, but without taxes.
Medical: When working in 3rd world countries, those strings are absolutely necessary or the money just goes into mansions and swiss bank accounts.
If you save thousands of people from being killed or maimed by measles, polio, malaria, and other diseases in Africa, but you don't bow your head to the left's concerns over patents, then those people you helped don't matter. You must advance the cause. And the cause is about money, not about whether children are crippled by polio or die of measles.
And the experiments to improve education threaten to disrupt the cash flow from teachers' union dues. Stop those too.
That's the same logic (ironically) that justifies government run markets. Turns out, most the time the system of supply and demand and capitalism does a much better job regulating the production and distribution of goods even with all the inherent waste (consider how many resources go into marketing, for instance). By the same token, some sort of regulation of the foundation, be it a custodial board or whatever, can help criticize the actual acts of the foundation instead of merely leaving it up to a few people who may be very unqualified on knowing how to get results when it comes to an area they've not demonstrated an aptitude for.
As the GP says, that was an option. You miss the obvious point, though, that since a regulatory system is obviously not in place internally, external "regulation" in the form of investigators end up taking their place and writing about it. This media-based inspection may or may not have any effect since, again, "it's their money". But if the whole point of the Foundation was not merely to achieve its ends but also to get some sort of positive PR, then presenting a case on where it's failing to actually deliver might change what the Foundation does and how it's structured so such issues are less likely to happen in the end.
Funny how that works.
The good the foundation has done, she believes, is far outweighed by the harm
The Gates foundation mainly spends money on education and healthcare. In healthcare, the Gates foundation has spent $15 billion on improving vaccines, etc. This (and money from other sources) has resulted in a reduction of deaths by measles in Africa by 90%. Polio, tuberculosis, and HIV have all been reduced, thanks in part to the Gates foundation.
So what's the problem? According to the author, "The failure to combat obesity, cancer and heart disease epidemics in poor nations,” she observes, “has been one of the most glaring mistakes of global development efforts in recent years." So maybe they could have allocated their resources better.
In education, the author is upset that the Gates foundation spent money on things that didn't work. For example, they spent billions to create small schools based on the idea that it would give students more personalized attention. Unfortunately, that didn't improve college acceptance rates, so Gates ended the program.
If the author thinks that "dropping/modifying a program when data indicates it doesn't work" is a bad thing, then I'm forced to disagree heartily with her. In fact, if the only thing accomplished by the Gates foundation is to get people to do that more often, then it will be a huge success as far as I'm concerned. And I'm no fan of Gates.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wow, this book is a Slashdotter's wet dream. I haven't read it, but if they include conspiracy theories about how Bill is actually somehow making more money off his donations, there will be a whole lot of splooge expelled while reading this book.
First, it's his money, worst case he's putting it back in the economy to people who need it more. Second, no matter what course of philanthropic work you take there will be some way for someone to criticize it. It's similar to how conspiracy theories work. People ignore the _mountain_ of evidence for an event's explanation and instead nitpick on small details in a chaotic situation. "OMG the firefighter said something slightly off while sitting around in 9/11 chaos, it proves that it was a conspiracy!". Sorry, real life isn't all 1s and 0s.
Sounds like some idiot who thinks they could do so much more good with someone else's money cherry-picking a bunch of bitter gripes.
Oh he'll give money to schools as long as they switch to common core.
through their efforts at disease elimination. How many lives has Linsey McGoey saved? Zilch.
Does the book recommend the fail fast approach?
The fail-fast and fail-often approach could be criticized when applied to human beings. But the Gates foundation is in precisely the right place to try audacious ideas. Good for them to bin projects that didn't give results.
Nova never does anything on global warming. He got what he paid for.
Why is Snark Required?
Hmm...NSTAAFG...nope, stil prefer TNSTAAFL, it's just easier to say...and I like food :)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
The Gates' give a fortune to causes they believe will improve life. Person without a foundation thinks they could do better. Examples given are not better. Some people may not be inclined to criticize the bestower of grants. Person without a foundation, or a Gates' grant, is a bit miffed.
for a modest lump sum of $20,000,000 USD or Euro
I will not say anything bad about Windows on the Internet for the rest of my life.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
"They are acting liberal but not liberal ENOUGH! They don't subscribe to precisely my kind of politics, so I need to hate on what they do."
People like the author piss me off. They aren't interested in any actual good, they are just interested in their agenda being pushed.
They're surrounded by water and they still ration fish. Wow, what efficiency!
The Gates Foundation picks winners and losers in education to a great degree. For instance, they have given a lot of support to Khan Academy,which has used this support to close off similar innovations with greater geo-educational reach and measurement possibilities. Gates let Khan suck all the air out of the room; it's been a maddening thing to witness!
To a critic who hasn't done even 0.0000001% as much good as the Gates Foundation.
Teddy Roosevelt had something to say about people who stand around sniping at people who, you know, are doing something and making an effort.
Oh he'll give money to schools as long as they switch to common core.
Bullshit; not true.
California is on the coast and they're rationing water...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Exactly. "Bill and Melinda Gates answer to no electorate, board, or shareholders; they are accountable mainly to themselves." first she has to establish that this is a problem and why. Possibly she did and the reviewer missed that, but it doesn't seem that way.
Hey Linsey McGoey: Sad day for you!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What if the KochBros started funding Quiverfull private schools?
Should we be concerned, make popcorn, or wait until it ever happens?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It goes there anyway. The difference is WHOSE mansions and bank accounts.
The foundation basically is just a way to funnel more money into their own banks.
I'm not a Micrisoft fan, but "Hooking the poor on malaria drugs"? Yeah, like Jonas Salk hooked us on polio vaccine.
Last week I was at a post production studio in Mumbai. The editor was working on an Indian Hindi TV series - MAIN KUCH BHI KAR SAKTHI HOON (I Can Do Anything.) https://www.youtube.com/user/mkbksh
The show is set in rural India, follows the usual Hindi or Indian cinema/television melodramatic hyperventilating style. Here is the beef...rather than inane plots on good versus evil, bad mother in laws and familiar Indian TV soap tropes, this show had female protagonists who were bucking the system and bringing out change in the society.
The familiar style they used made sure a majority of the audience will feel comfortable.
Gates Foundation was one of the Producers. This is thinking out of the box...you need a bit of 'good old propaganda' to support you when you go to rural communities to change their perception on unhealthy practices.
Tat Tvam Asi
I realize you're being facetious, but I still want to remind people that the Golden State produces a ridiculous percentage of the country's produce that is not corn or wheat. That's where most of the water goes, even during severe droughts. http://www.slate.com/articles/...
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
For all his "geek" status, Bill Gates (with his foundation) failed elementary statistics. He succumbed to the law of small numbers and idiotically pushed for smaller schools for a long period spending a lot of time, money and energy convincing policy makers that the small schools will make students better.
They thought so only because frequently among the best performing schools were small schools. Idiots didn't notice that among the worst performers were ALSO small schools - small samples just lend themselves to a higher variability.
Read details here - http://marginalrevolution.com/...
If a lot of money is spent by non-accountable idiot organizations , it is not only not good for society but actively harmful.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Also, Linsey McGoey is fully in her rights to critique how they spend it.
Sure, but keep in mind that she has a much bigger incentive to be negative, than to be positive. Far more people will buy her book if she says philanthropy is harmful, since then the readers can feel smug and superior about doing nothing.
These "foundations" are just diverse investment portfolios. These "philanthropists" make a fortune out of their charity. How? They own the companies the charity uses, particularly those with meds in the third world, and those being aided are only allowed to have products from these companies. It's a complete joke, but can you bet your last euro-dollar-pound, no reporter will go anywhere what's really going on.
One could argue that the Gates Foundation and governmental bodies are accountable to the same people. Who else can fund the campaigns of our politicians who provide that oversight the author mentions...?
Medical: When working in 3rd world countries, those strings are absolutely necessary or the money just goes into mansions and swiss bank accounts.
It's actually much worse. If you don't play the Big Pharma Strong IP game, you can't get help from the Gates Foundation. And if you do, and then you have an outbreak of something expensive to cure in your country, you have two choices. You can make the medication yourself, and eventually end up with the world bank owning your country. Or you can pay whatever the market demands for the medication, and you can end up with the world bank owning your country.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
supporting links please?
I don't know if the Gates are responsible for the direction CC has taken in addition to it being yet another program that's been hijacked by the educational establishment. In any case, they should not be funding it.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I read the whole article. From what I read, I can summarize this as :
Two people with insane amounts of money and accountable to no one decide to spend their money trying to solve problems by taking a new approach. Their approach spans from :
- Trial and error with greater agility than a government or classic foundation can achieve
- Brute force of attacking illnesses on a gigantic scale hoping to eradicate them and maybe then focus on helping people live healthier following being able to simply live to begin with.
They are also accused of being know-it-alls and people can't tell if they're altruistic or if they're evil and trying to take over the world by trying to solve problems governments seem to fail to solve on their own.
I'm sure I missed a few, but whether I'm a fan of the Gateses or note is irrelevent.If they are a bunch of greedy power hungry assholes, it doesn't matter to me. A long as they are in fact trying to solve problems. We need more people who are like them.
BTW... the cure for poverty in my opinion is better education. I believe the small schools effort (probably a bad idea) had a pretty good intent which is that the transition itself would make things like new books and cleaner classrooms available to students. It would disrupt the system and the reversion to the traditional system would require the government to invest to support the transition back. It's not a great answer to any problems, but it did give schools run by generally lethargic administration a kick in the ass for a while. The failure of this experiment probably ended up being part of the solution to the problem itself.
As for Common Core... that's purely political as to what you go with. Common Core was at least an attempt to standardized a system and make better teaching materials available. I'm not in favor of it and I've had to teach my children math properly to compensate for the massive short-comings in the common core way of handling problems. But I didn't simply discount it, I evaluated it, learned it and felt it was a considerable hindrance from my son and daughter learning more advanced mathematics.
Last century, the Netherlands helped some African countries by building wells. This resulted in people not having to walk miles for water, but water consumption also got higher. The groundwater levels dropped, and the next season the wells were dry, but also the old wells dried up. The even-more-extreme drought was very bad. They solved it by making the wells deeper.
Yup, and they totally earned it fairly and squarely.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151125-why-are-we-so-suspicious-of-being-kind comes a good reason for Gates to give:
Michael Norton at Harvard Business School has offered some of the most convincing evidence, repeatedly finding that people who spend a bigger proportion of their income on others tend to be far happier, in the long run, than those spending it on themselves.
Crucially, this is not just the result of the comfortable Western lifestyle: Norton has tested the concept with data from more than 130 countries, from the US to Uganda. “Across all countries – rich or poor, and in every continent – people who gave more tended to be happier people,” he says. For this reason, he thinks the joy of giving appears to be a “psychological universal” – a trait that lies at the core of human nature, independent of your culture.
Yup, and they totally earned it fairly and squarely.
No they didn't. Read the findings of fact by judge Jackson. Just because Microsoft was able to buy and lobby it's way out of punishment doesn't mean that what they were doing was okay.
In the end there are a number of other companies, such as possibly Netscape, which would have either survived or been replaced by other more effective companies if Microsoft hadn't indulged in illegal anti-competitive activities. The money belongs to consumers and Microsoft customer companies that were fleeced and investors who had or would have developed better products than Gates but never made it because they didn't have control over Windows.
You're an idiot, and probably a cormanust too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ppl who have amassed such grotesque excesses of wealth cannot be "philantropists" - they had to take what they consider "theirs" away from other people in the first place. now they want to buy a better public image and a better personal conscience for themselves.
"charity" is just the privatization of basic human rights immanent in every single person born on our planet. (some people get filthy rich by playing a dysfunctional system and denying them to the majority of humans.)
Well, if we didn't have California, you and I both know what would be done, because we already 'done' it more than 180 years ago. A shortage is nothing more than an argument over the price. We don't do desalination because they say it's too expensive, I don't believe it is, but I have no way to force the issue. I remember the drought of '77. Now, almost 40 years later, the only thing being shown to the world is a perfect example of bad, corrupt management. Still, everybody bickers over price, and nothing gets produced, while lawyers get rich. And it is so weird that they have the very same governor now as they did back then. I can't fathom what the voters are thinking. They are using something other than their brain.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”