Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

insatiablefox.com

153 pointsmike2477128 comments

If you put aside the "M$ was evil and he is just atoning" arguments, Gates is a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he's passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe inspiring.

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the 90's. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee's knees, I wanted to be as effective as Gates.

Also worth mentioning is that, over the years, Microsoft has published an impressive amount of research, whereas (e.g.) Apple has always been disappointingly closed.

I think Apple revolutionized HCI with the Mac and then with the iPod and now with iOS. They continue to push the bar in industrial design. They're contributing in different ways. I'd not belittle their achievements. Design principles that Apple has long been following are the norm today. Every tech company has done their part. I don't like this constant bickering, I wish people were more accepting and just saw the positive side of things more often.

With the ironic effect that I and a friend were often disappointed by the lack of innovation in MS products (that changed a bit recently).

I'm of the opinion that Gates hasn't really changed, just found a more socially-acceptable way to use his fundamental personality.

This qualifies as goodness in my books. No one is free of egoism and selfishness. People are good if they subordinate their egoism and selfishness to a higher principle of care for others, and seek satisfaction of their baser impulses through actions that are socially constructive and beneficial.

It's hard to guess what motivated the grandparent's comment but if I had to guess, it has something to do with the cultural aversion to public philanthropy which traces back to Matthew 6:3

    But when thou doest alms, let not thy
    left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

As an atheist who was raised Catholic, many of the teachings of Jesus still make sense to me from a moral standpoint. This one does not. Keeping your charitable efforts quiet seems like a bad thing to do if you want to get others involved so that you might actually make a difference some day.

Here is the preceding verse, Mathew 6:2

"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."

I think what Jesus meant was that letting others know was not the problem, but giving alms for the sake of being honored by others. These good deeds were not done out of mercy for fellow human beings, but to improve their stature in society.

And what people are trying to say is: that may be a bad thing, but it does not cancel out the good thing you did. You now did both a good and a bad thing. Not just a bad thing.

We try to judge people based on their actions. Someone messes up and defends themselves with "I was only trying to help!" - "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."[0] The fact that proverb exists at all, means that our society has at least a partial inclination towards judging people on their actions, regardless of intention.

Well, if that applies in the "mean good, do bad = bad" case, then it should apply symmetrically in the "mean bad, do good = good" case.

Concretely: Bill Gates does some good. Someone says: he's only doing it to atone. So it doesn't count. --- the first part is not the problem, but the second part is. He still did good, and it still counts. Hate his character all you want, but he did good. Don't use his character to detract from his actions.

[0] There's even a Wikipedia page about it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with...

There is a view that good actions only count if there is sacrifice. As he still has 30+ billion the net impact of his giving at a personal level was Zero. Hell, he said several times he did not like being the worlds richest person. So, arguably he may have been acting in a completly selfish fasion.

Consider a Pimp finds out he can londer money and find new girls by setting up a homeless shelter. Is setting up the shelter a good action?

The analogy is poor. The argument being discussed is whether Bill did something bad and uses the results to fuel the good he does in order to atone for his bad. In your analogy, the pimp does something good and uses it to fuel the bad he does.

For the record, Bill's business practices sucked, but there's no denying that he had better vision for tech than the monster of his day, IBM. Each age has its villain, each of which has been far from what the world considers to be truly evil.

I think you missed the connection. Gates did not want to be the richest person in the world any more. Giving that money to charity was a socially acceptable way of doing so. Thus, it may have been a selfish action with a net positive outcome.

The pimps homeless shelter might also be a net positive impact. It seems far more selfish.

Alternatively it may have started Gates down a different path which changed his mindset. I can't know as this is all internal. The point is some people feel the internal reasoning is just as important as the outcome.

PS: This is one of the reasons the law cares about internal reasoning not just outcomes.

You have a point, but I'd say it's only try to say to avoid doing it for your own benefit.

Wow. It's not often you find a situation where straight-up capitalism is morally superior to Jesus. You do charity for recognition and your own ego? Awesome. Rock on, dude.

The important thing is that the charity gets done.

Presbyterian here. We were taught you can't buy your way into Heaven. Yes, donate to charity. But don't publicly congratulate yourself.

I've worked to overcome my WASP reluctance to talk about money. As a geek, we should be comparing salaries. As an activist, to be effective you need resources, which is a nice proxy for buy-in, so you learn how to ask for money.

Yes, donate to charity. But don't publicly congratulate yourself.

Yes, and this is the concept I take issue with. If Bill Gates's continued public dialogue over his charitable actions convinces other billionaires to join the cause, how is that anything other than a net positive? He may yet succeed in wiping out malaria when he might not have succeeded had he kept quiet.

The goal of any charitable act should be to make your charity obsolete. Quiet, private giving in small amounts without a coordinated plan does not accomplish that. It merely serves to feed somebody for another day.

I believe we're in agreement. I only mention my upbringing to note that Protestants had their own reasons for keeping their charity private and just how hard it is change one's early indoctrination.

Well, the point of the teaching is to allow other people, not the person doing alms, to know that money for philanthropy is coming out of the rich guy's "charity" budget rather than his "public relations" budget.

This is misguided, but it's not hard to understand where the idea came from.

Even if Microsoft was evil, Gates is still an inspiration to me.

Because Microsoft was evil, Gates is an inspiration to me.

Why?

I think it means that he is an inspiration for money drove minds.

Because my aunt stopped beating his child after 15 years and started to work in a dog shelter, she is an inspiration to me ?

Err... no.

>Because my aunt stopped beating his child

It's beyond ridiculous to compare anything that Gates did to physical violence. He had a few vicious, harmful business tactics. His overall benefit to society, especially if you include his philanthropic work, is likely beyond what most people here will ever achieve.

People died because Gate financed the green revolution in Africa.

System were corrupt because of him.

Next to that, beating one child is less harm, not matter how awful it is.

I dunno if it's rediculous... anyone who struggles to improve theirself should be applauded.

Some of us are innately more immoral/moral.

And that's a big problem: you are willing to ignore 30 years of bad behavior because now he changed is marketting strategy.

Even if he is doing good now (debatable, but for the sake of argument let's say he is), it's a good forget the past. As a society, we need to remember, and we need to stand against it, not praise a bad guy as soon as he start not acting bad.

If (and it's a big if), he is doing good right now, it's just normal. It's what he was supposed to be doing from the begining. There is nothing special here, except somebody less misbehaving.

It's like when a pop star stops coke. He/she get praises. What the heck ? Most people just don't do coke. You stop ? Good for you. Now let me read actual news.

Bill Gates reminds me a lot of John D. Rockefeller. He had earned $260 billion (adjusted for inflation) through standard oil and is said to be a ruthless business man. However, in the second half of his life, he turned to philanthropy and created a contrastingly positive image in the public's eye. I'm not sure the depth of their similarities but this is what it seems like to me on a surface level.

> and is said to be a ruthless business man.

Rockefeller reduced the price of kerosene by 70% over the years he ran SO, thus (literally) fueling the industrial expansion of America, and making cheap kerosene available to everyone.

To say that benefitted nobody but him is ridiculous. Read "Titan" by Chernow.

Mobsters, thieves & politicians tend to do "good" after getting caught for malfeasance, too. WG didn't get "caught", he(MS) gamed the system, incorporated others' work & ruined most competitors. Now he gets to live with his conscience.

Extend. Embrace. Extinguish. Atone.

If you read "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman, you'll see that most of his competitors ruined themselves all by themselves.

It's not easy to run a successful business. My own, Zortech, would have been far more successful if I'd had half a brain instead of only a quarter of one.

If we put aside that the money isn't his, he kneecapped better products with such ferocity that a generation later our industry is still struggling to make up for the lost progress.

> lost progress

Actually, MS-DOS was the first more or less standardized platform across diverse computers, which enabled software developers to develop for a market several orders of magnitude larger than what had existed before. The result was an explosion of software being developed.

I don't see how this retarded progress.

Both CP/M and MS-DOS enabled portable code that runs on various hardware, but devs wrote software that required PC-compatible hardware anyway because sometimes it was a lot faster to bypass the OS.

MS got market share by being cheaper, and once the network effect was in their favor they kept it by threatening OEMs who dared sell anything else to willing customers.

CP/M and MS-DOS weren't really an 'operating system' in the sense that they didn't mediate application access to system resources. They didn't let two apps share even fundamental devices like the clock, timer interrupts, networks, serial ports and on and on. In fact they didn't support multiple apps much at all.

I would call both of them 'monitors' or something. Operating System is way to ambitious a name for what they did.

The FDA, CDC, American Government, and Patent System, have all crippled progress far more than Bill Gates or Microsoft ever did.

That he is not literally Hitler is a pretty damning complement.

(CDC? Really?)

How is that germain?

THREAD OF CONVERSATION: Bill Gates is a murderer!

PHILLIP HAYDRON: Jeffrey Dahmer has murdered far more than he ever did!

SCO

That's debatable.

Then debate it, I'm interested in your perspective. Saying "that's debatable" adds nothing to the conversation and essentially means "I don't agree".

In the sense that everything is debatable, yes.

Tu quoque?

The size of the Gates Foundation is only impressive if you believe public policy should be disproportionately influenced by the whims of a few rich individuals. Philanthropists may not be motivated by profit like lobbyists, but that doesn't mean they understand the needs of the people any better. For issues related to relatively concrete sciences like medicine this matters less. But in areas such as education for example, the role of the Gates foundation has been disastrous.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates-foundation...

Disastrous? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? Reading the article, perhaps "ineffective" could be argued. Maybe their support of Common Core and such did more harm than good, but they've pivoted based on evidence.

They're trying their best to do good with their money. This is more than can be said for most billionaires. Are you suggesting it would be better if all billionaires simply kept their money in the family and didn't try to help others?

Any bold investment carries a risk of failure. Does that mean no one should make bold investments, to you?

Amen.

If you're right, then I'd say that it's still trivially outweighed by the Gates Foundation's efforts on disease reduction. Each billion dollars spent fighting malaria buys a whole lot of indulgences.

Also, he is giving back the money he took, and then more. That also buys him a lot of forgiveness.

Gates didn't take his wealth, he created it and earned it.

Having a monopoly isn't illegal in the US. Making billions of dollars with a monopoly is not illegal in the US. The abuses in the market that Microsoft was found guilty of, they were punished for. What else are you asking for exactly?

Gates doesn't need any forgiveness. His former company's wrongs have already been accounted for - a long time ago - through an appropriate legal process.

No but corruption is illegal. Stealing is illegal.

And many things he did while legal, were highly immoral, such as: lying, cheating, investing capital in weapon makers and companies doing the opposite of what he is defending now, tax optimization, heavy lobying, retaining a huge part of capital and not letting it flows in the economy, abusing monopoly, patent trolls (and other kind of extorsions), censorship, helping dictatures, etc.

He earned a lot of money doing so, and the cumulated consequences of those are huge. The fact that people are so quick to forgive and forget those prove that not only he got top noch PR people, but that people are ready to accept anything with a good PR.

Sometimes I wonder if humanity deserve freedom, because it seems it's wired to go in the exact opposite direction and love to allow bad people to shine. Democracy is a long term process, not a 5 minutes vote. It requires you to not allow those persons to mess with the system, then get your blessing years later.

>were highly immoral

Your profile says you blog about porn. Personally, I'm a consumer and have no issue. But you have a lot of nerve lecturing people about immorality. That isn't the most "above board" industry, and it may have even harmed a person or three.

>but that people are ready to accept anything with a good PR.

Yeah, nobody "gets it" but you...

A lot of men watch porn, few men corrupt governments and finance weapons. Your take.

> patent trolls

Microsoft has probably been the least aggressive of the larger software companies in the use of patents. While Gates ran it, I don't recall them ever using patents to shut down competitors. They did collect a "war chest" of patents, but as a defensive "mutually assured destruction" strategy.

Microsoft was famously sued by Apple over "look and feel" copyrights. After that, who could blame them for amassing a large patent portfolio?

What money did he "take"?

At least $200 million or so from my Government, the result of straight-up corruption. From here http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/technology/us-said-to-look...:

> The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into bribery accusations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is a confidential legal matter.

The article is 3-year old and of course nothing came out of it, but based on the very happy coincidence that our Government signed a big contract with MS just days after Ballmer had paid a quick visit to our God-forsaken country back in 2004 and that the PM at the time was a corrupt guy (who later on went to prison for other stuff) I'm 100% sure that MS (and Gates) actually took that money out of our pockets.

>I'm 100% sure that MS (and Gates) actually took that money out of our pockets.

So, Microsoft, which was headed by Ballmer at the time (Gates already years into retirement from operations), took a contract from your corrupt government, that might have broken a law (never proven)...and Bill Gates is to blame?

You have a lot of misplaced anger.

Bill Gates also visited the country shortly after Ballmer's visit and after the contract had been signed. Yes, Bill Gates is to blame, among many others.

> You have a lot of misplaced anger.

I'm angered by many other things some of which I have control over, economic colonialism (like it happened in this case) I have no control over so no reason to be angered about. Just wanted to add a different perspective to things.

Not to diminish the magnitude of his foundation, but he's still personally worth over $77 billion and is the richest person in the US (Forbes, 2015).

But he's promised to give it all away within 10 years of his death. So this is a null point.

It would appear that taxing people and then using the money for ill-thought out, centrally planned, self-aggrandizing projects is fine as long as it's rich people or corporations, not democratically elected governments doing it.

I am trying to understand the sentiment that leads to this perspective. Perhaps people abhor the inefficiency of democratic systems. Or maybe this is a sign of social decay.

Ponder institutional corruption and you may realize capitalism in it's extremest form is as toxic to the common good as is extremes of communism or socialism. We are parasites to our environs and each other, and that can be a GOOD thing(cooperation, trade, specialization) when it is symbiotic, but when one entity takes all it devolves into parisitoidism(aka, harming or killing the host).

But there is no global public policy funded by global taxation and based on global democracy.

On a national level, I would agree with you that outsized influence of charity vs public policy is a bad sign, even if the results may not be so bad at some point in time.

But on a global level, things are very different. Those who distribute public development funds cannot be voted out of office by those who receive or don't receive those funds. So charity is all we have. Even public development spending is basically charity as it's not based on rights or on democratic participation.

It's worth noting that governments contribute far more than private organizations to things like AIDS research. I should have mentioned that in the article.

See this article (fig 1) - http://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/Resou...

I proceeded to your linked article, and while I see that the author's opinion is "Gates' Foundation did far more harm than good in education," I don't actually see the examples put forward supporting their (/your) position on that.

The only examples are "The Gates Foundation tried something, found it didn't work, and so stopped doing that thing [smaller schools.]" They're then criticized for attempting teacher metrics, and a couple paragraphs later, "they've since backed off on this, but the damage of their influence has already been suffered!" Which, to me, reads again as "they thought teacher metrics would work. They found it didn't, so they stopped doing that."

Actually, a lot of that article basically reads as "no one should ever make calculated experiments to discover what the most effective interventions are. How dare the Gates Foundation not be all-knowing! And if they're not going to be all-knowing, they have no right to admit to a mistake and back off on a failed intervention!"

I- what?? What?!

Presumably, then, the author (or the people the author is echoing) can put forward a better alternative, rather than just criticize the organization for recognizing failure and re-allocating resources. "Assuming that poverty is not going to be solved overnight, what other, more immediate steps might be taken to address these problems? How might Gates spend its money more wisely? McGoey offers little guidance on this. She seems to have visited few schools and talked to few teachers or parents. Nor does she give much space to the perspective of the Gates Foundation itself."

She then slams the Gates Foundation for doing "considerable good" in public health. What's their flaw, then? The author's unsubstantiated assertion that they ignored opportunity cost. Not even that. She sort of /implies/ that other health interventions would have had greater public health ROI (by pointing out that chronic disease is very expensive, she leads us to conclude "why, then we could save a lot of money by intervening there", ignoring whether that larger cost correlates to more lives saved per dollar spent), and that the Gates Foundation ignores them, but doesn't actually provide any stats on that being the case. Which makes sense, of course, because there aren't any good stats to support that argument: the Gates Foundation particularly staked out their interests in extremely high ROI illnesses. It's shit-tons cheaper to save a man-year from malaria than to save one from type 2 diabetes.

This is not a great article. The author, Michael Massing, appears to have written it with far more bias than critical attention, and you should reconsider letting it inform your opinions.

Only people who do nothing and just watch don't make mistakes.

>McGoey (along with many others) is sharply critical of this movement. She cites studies that show that charter schools have performed no better or worse than traditional public schools

Oh come on now.

Bill Gates was a tough competitor, to be sure, and you had to bring your A game when dealing with Microsoft. But the complaints that he was 'evil', when you drill down to see what the actual complaint is, just seem to fade away. Most of it seems to be simply envy.

See "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman.

P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against Microsoft in programming languages.

Sure, it was just smart business plays in the tech industry, not really "evil" like physically harming people or stealing stuff from them.

But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in their day.

Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary patches.

And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them in xml tags!"

Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if linux worked great with it: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...

So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to. But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way to make my life worse, over and over again.

I switched from Netscape to Explorer because the latter crashed about half as often. It was as simple as that.

And back in the early 80's, MS-DOS sold for $40. Digital Research's CPM/86 sold for $186. They were on the shelf at Egghead next to each other. There's no surprise that people bought MS-DOS. Wouldn't you? I did. Kildall thought people would pay a large premium for CPM/86. He made a huge mistake (especially since nobody at the time could explain to me why CPM/86 was better, and after later trying it out, I couldn't see anything better about it, either).

As for incompatible file formats, just about every last software company tried that. Read about the legendary battles over the zip file format. WordStar didn't use a standard file format. Neither did Wordperfect. Every printer had a different, proprietary command language. Every graphics card had a different interface. I once was paid to spend a lovely 3 weeks in Japan getting some graphics software to work with the various Japanese graphics cards. I could go on for hours :-)

You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.

I bought an early Amiga in order to port the compiler to it. It irritated me that they used standard connectors, but changed one pin in order to force people to buy peripherals from them. I thought that strategy would doom Amiga, and decided not to expend my dev time on it.

DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring special floppy disks), with the same results.

> They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position.

That reminds me of governments too. Administration is .. well, known synonym for latency, resistance etc etc, yet when it's in the interest of the government/state (finding bad taxpayers) all of a sudden everything is lean, fast, beautifully smart.[1]

It's a survival effect crossing through the layers.

[1] A friend told me how he received a letter explaining the state found his job and relationship status through cross relating pieces of data between two families that indicates the 'couple' shouldn't benefit some 'student loans' anymore.

> Most of it seems to be simply envy.

For me it was frustration with Windows, until I gave it up back, in 2004. I used to rage at it's instability and difficult reinstallation process when various device drivers were involved.

I would never have imagined I will have such a positive view on Bill Gates a decade later. He's smart because, after spending half his life amassing a fortune, he is now spending the other half of his life spending it. Money is just numbers sitting in an account if you don't do anything with it.

> He's smart because, after spending half his life amassing a fortune, he is now spending the other half of his life spending it

So it does not matter how the fortune was amassed in the first place? As long as you spend some of it and polish your PR image later on ?

People forget/forgive pretty fast, for me that's the only thing I retain from this story.

I don't care so much in his case, but the problem is more that it doesn't scale - if someone is able to make money through means such as those, there's no guarantee that they'll give it back in such a "socially good" way - the odds are rather against it.

But I think it's silly to put an asterisk on the good he's actually doing.

His fortune went from 45B in 2008 to 75B in 2015. Hell of a way to spend money!

edit: B, not M. Thanks.

Picking 2008, when stock values tanked and then rebounded, is cherry-picking and undermines your point.

> His fortune went from 45M in 2008 to 75M in 2015.

That would be a pretty shocking spending spree. A 70% increase just can't make up for a 99.9% decrease beforehand.

You meant billion, not million.

It always bothers me when those who worship someone for his wealth dismiss those who dislike that same someone for his actions simply as a matter of envy.

I would argue that many people are envious of his ability to succeed rather than his wealth.

I'm envious, but in a good way. I think there are good things to take from him, even from his so-called evilness. I'd like to be a bit more like him in many ways.

On the other hand, his business choices still frustrate me as an engineer, but I understand we just had opposing goals. I don't agree with a lot of what he and his company did.

Disregarding opinions as envy is more often than not a case of not putting yourself in other's shoes. Oversimplification is always wrong.

I gave reasons and even a book reference. It really is a good read and worth while.

> This book says that you are envious.

No.

Right, don't ever read anything you might disagree with.

No book can demonstrate that the reason he dislikes Bill Gates is envy. The authoritative source for that information is in his skull, not in a book written by somebody who never even met him.

Hey there, data geeks!

I am doing research on the rise of social entrepreneurship and got sidetracked by what a badass Bill Gates is. I found out that his foundation is 4x larger than the next largest private foundation in the US. And if you add up the wealth pledged as a part of The Giving Pledge it is 10x larger than that.

I compiled The Giving Pledge data on my own by researching net worths of each pledgee. Planning to put the data on the Wikipedia page shortly.

I found the other data from the following sources (see direct links in article):

Foundation Center The Giving Pledge NP Trust GBD Compare AVAC

Happy to answer any questions and would love feedback.

How about a comparison with historical philanthropists like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in constant currency?

Or as ratio of nominal GDP at the time.

The Gates data is inspirational. Glad you put that in perspective.

However, we need to see more data on the impact of the Giving Pledge, and whether it has led to more giving. In your chart, the assumption is that this money is more than would have been given without the Pledge. Also, the comparison to amount pledged (most of which will eventually make its way into foundations that will spread the money on their own time schedules) with the amount donated in 2014 is not a telling comparison.

Consider, for example, my billionaire mother. Before she died, a couple of years ago, we discussed whether she should be joining The Giving Pledge. She decided she didn't want to be seen in the company of billionaires who had pledged to give away only 50% of their money. "Why would a billionaire want to keep half of their money, anyway? What could someone possibly do, personally, with half a billion dollars? I don't want to join a group like that!"

To understand the impact of The Giving Pledge we'd need to know how much would have been given without the pledge? Does the Pledge provide peer pressure to give away more than they would have otherwise given? Or does this pledge lead to less giving, because it makes billionaires feel that it's morally OK to give away just 50%? Do you have the comparison data to answer these questions?

Unfortunately I don't think that data is available. But from what I understand it has led to more giving. See this article - http://fortune.com/2010/06/16/the-600-billion-challenge/

Is there anywhere I could access/read the research, or is it just the information you have on that blog?

I was surprised to not find a comparison between those private charitable contributions and the money spent by nations all over the world on similar programs. Unless I am missing something, it would look to me like the Giving Pledge, all together, spent more money on the fight against AIDS in the last 10 years than the U.S. government did [0]. If that is true, then there are still the questions left of who spent money more efficiently, whether and which other uses of taxes are more important than the fight against AIDS, as well as the general philosophical question of whether we should allow a few individuals to control how a huge proportion of the resources of the world are used, and under which circumstances. But beyond all those delta-from-the-ideal-world questions, it is indeed a pretty huge amount of good likely being done there.

[0] http://kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/u-s-federal-f...

Website needs some work for mobile view:

http://i.imgur.com/vlwi2hh.jpg

Yes, and the Subscribe popup breaks it on mobile.

Definitely needs some work! Appreciate the feedback. Just launched the blog two weeks ago. Working out the kinks :)

More and more I feel the best data visualization for most scenario is just bar, line, and pie charts. They need no explanation and communicate information effectively.

Too many visualizations that are fun and fancy but convey ideas poorly.

Pie Charts are the Worst [1]. In this context, a single pie chart is OK. I agree bar and line charts should usually be sufficient.

http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013...

Scatter plots can be decent, too.

I was expecting to see a comparison to public sector development programs in countries with bigger government.

For example USA does only 0.22% of GNI in foreign aid compared to the 0.7% target and 0.3-0.5% realized in its cohort of industrialized countries. (http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm)

Don't you find very suspicous that since the past year, we get regularly those stories comming up in reddit, imgur, hacker news, etc ?

Think about it: there are a ton of nice people doing nice things around. Even tech people. But you hear only about Bill.

The Gate Foundation existed for a long time. It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before reaching me, BTW), and we didn't have this incredible "yeah, best man ever" crazy minset going around.

It smells a lot like well done PR, with a lot of money behind to give a better image of the man, targetting social networks by subtils channels.

And if you need PR and pays to much for it, you probably DON'T deserve the praises.

>It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before reaching me, BTW)

Maybe you should have taken the moral high ground and declined the money, rather than taking it, criticizing how much was "wasted", then bad-mouthing it on a public forum.

Talk about a sense of entitlement.

Yes, I made a bad decision. I don't pretend to be a wonderful person. However, I can see people are trying very hard to make sure people think Gate is. And he is not.

I was just pondering Gate's legacy the other day. While I was blowing away another copy of Windows that I paid for but never booted.

i'm curious as to whether it is more effective for an individual to hold a contribute-as-you go style to philantrophy vs a make-money-first-then-donate strategy like gates did. Given that most people aren't going to be billionaires, I would guess the former but maybe someone who has looked at the data can provide some insight.

Donating money if you are not (filthy) rich is foolish. Those money would be MUCH better spent on you. If you want to help, do it with personal efforts.

What makes you think so?

Because your money would not be spent efficiently.

I don't get it. If you are looking for pure efficiency, most people on here are much better working in IT and giving money to efficient charities.

If by personal efforts you mean helping out in a soup kitchen or flying to Detroit to help struggling kids---that's pretty inefficient.

Or did you mean something else?

Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ...

1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits.

2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services like education and healthcare. In the USA, they're not - the capital gains rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century.

3) Foundations work very well for tax planning. Who knows what their efficiency is as charity?

I worked for the Gates foundation as a researcher. I don't claim objectivity. My impression of the division I worked in was that it was poorly managed, very political, had little oversight from the big man himself as far as I know, and most importantly that it will not accomplish any of the goals it set out. Despite everything there was a lot of patting on the back and pretty words, with zero meaningful progress.

Internet is no longer free. After http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... I have trouble believing any account I read. You may be right but corruption is so rampant that you'll have to forgive me for my skepticism

"Convicted monopolist" really doesn't have much of a ring to it.

Especially when the only thing his company was ever found guilty of was bundling a web browser with the OS...

How many copies of Windows have you paid for but never used?

I have been running Linux on my personal machines since the early '90s. I try not to think about it.

There are many apps on my iphone that came bundled with it that I never use.

I'm a bit surprised. Most people in the 90's that I knew who ran Linux either repurposed an old machine to it that would otherwise have been scrap, or assembled a machine from parts. In neither case did they buy a Windows license for it.

I remember an Amazon employee telling me that it was hard to buy a Linux machine without Windows on it. I pointed out that Amazon at the time was selling a Linux machine buyable with "one click".

Anybody could make and sell CPUs without a license from Microsoft. It wasn't hard at all (just buy the components in bulk). Nor was it illegal. The issue was that people wanted to buy Windows machines.

The issue was that people wanted to buy Windows machines and Microsoft's licenses said that, if a company wanted to sell any copies of Windows, then every machine they sold had to have a copy of Windows installed. There were very few pre-installed Linux vendors (and still are) prior to the Netscape lawsuit, when Microsoft purportedly dropped the requirement.

I never really repurposed any old machines; I've always been a Unix guy, so I went from an old Amiga to Linux as the first desktop Unix I could get. (I have a floppy with 0.99pl14, the first kernel I ever built, here somewhere...)

I've also built my share of machines, but that never really worked for laptops. Plus, I'm old and tired.

If vendors could make money selling Linux machines, they would have. Like I said, it wasn't hard to get into that business. Even a niche business can be very profitable if it is not served by the rest of the industry.

People fail to understand the difference between innovation driven monopoly and government enforced monopoly.

The former is commendable, indicating that a company has developed a product so useful that it becomes so widely adopted as to become a monopoly. Nobody is forced to buy the product - people just find it so useful that the it dominates in the marketplace. And there is nothing preventing the rise of a competitor other than the monopolist's success. Got enough smarts and money to beat them? Then go for it.

That's quite different than when a company uses regulatory capture to get regulations passed that maintain their monopoly and block competitors.

You haven't listed all the possible options for obtaining a monopoly, though, including the one Microsoft was convicted of. In addition to creating a better product and by controlling the government, you can also engage in tying, whereby you have a monopoly (perhaps rightfully gained through innovation) and use it to gain a monopoly in another area by forcing customers to buy both together, you can sell at a loss until your competitors go out of business and then raise the price, you can collude with other companies to fix prices, or to only service certain areas or sectors.

Having a monopoly is not illegal, exploiting your position as a monopoly to maintain it is. That is what Microsoft did.

I understand that, and I like the label of Corporatism when it is a big company colluding with the state, as opposed to Capitalism, which is for all its good and bad, better than the alternatives right now.

Yeah, I guess those are pretty good labels. I looked for a succinct definition of Corporatism: "the control of a state or organization by large interest groups." That happens in every economic system, not just capitalism.

how does a company innovate themselves into a monopoly? what's stopping others just copying their innovation and competing with them?

True, and people tend to villify those they are envious of, or because they don't align with their views. Nobody is spotless, and if you think you are, your mirror is dirty. You can find bad about Jobs, Gates, Jesus, the Bible, the Quran, anything and anybody if you look hard enough. I think Gates is genuinely a decent human being, and does a lot of good; he puts his money where his mouth is. So there may be a million great souls who do not, or cannot contribute money or time. At least, whether you think ill of him or not, the effect is he has helped many, many people. You should weigh this against your accusations.

The capital gains tax rate is not 15%. It is 20%, plus a 3.8% Obamacare tax. So Bill Gates is probably paying 23.8% on investment profits.

Here in California there is a lovely 13.3% tax, bringing the total to 37.1%. Bill Gates is a resident of Washington, though, so he doesn't pay that.

You can't blame Washington for not having a state income tax, though. Their tax laws seem to have worked out very well for them in attracting companies like Microsoft and Amazon.

> Who knows what their efficiency is as charity?

That's exactly what the article explores.

I think it's a little outlandish to suggest that Bill Gates started the Gates Foundation in order to make more money or save on tax breaks.

Did he do it for his ego? Maybe. But it'd be hard to find someone who has done great work who didn't do it for their ego.

Being a skeptic in an internet forum is easy. Solving problems that The Gates Foundation has set out to solve isn't. I'll continue to lionize those who do the latter.

I'd request Gates to contribute to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals

They're on it.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Speeches/2013/03...

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