Tough questions we get asked: 2018 Annual Letter
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires-significant...
There's a huge number of examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_compa...).
Essentially, if you think of government subsidies to private companies as assistance in making profit (which happens often when a government wants to promote a certain industry, even if it's only in form of a tax cut), having commercial companies to take care of common utilities is a way to assist the government paying for those utilities.
That was the key point of the original discussion about Gates' money and rising inequality, so the example is very valid.
Most of the time it's because these companies are government-approved monopoly (no other company can enter the market) or because they're heavily subsidised using taxes (no other company can enter the market practically because competing against someone who you fund at the same time is impossible and because the prices are below the actual expenses) and are actually losing huge amounts of money. Typically railways all around Europe are not profitable at all.
Volkswagen is a very special case, but you're partially right. I'd say it's an exception to the rule though.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.
the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.
I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.
Meaning when people start voting in policies that "tax the rich", you will probably be considered one of "them" by the average working class American.
Look no further than the new tax code that basically hurt the "rich" in places like CA and NY.
2) We impose many restrictions on use of money. Some things can't be bought at any price; others already have restrictions (e.g. campaign contribution limits). Are all of these inadmissible?
I'm not saying this is the case I Bill Gates but I'm not sure of any other way to encourage risk taking at the bottom except the promise of obscene wealth.
The problem with relying on philanthropy to fund the public good is that we the people are counting on the philanthropist to have goals that align with our goals. Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.
This is ostensibly one of the reasons "we" choose to democratically organize a government to fund the public good: So that we're not so reliant on the whims of a few rich people. It's to avoid the nightmare scenario where the worlds richest person decides instead to use his money for evil. Not saying that government can't use their power for evil, just that, at least in theory, we can vote in new government. We can't vote for different World's Richest People.
Actually, you did get that dice roll too. Look up the house of Saud.
You can't get the tax deduction by donating money to organizations that haven't passed through this review process.
It is intellectually lazy and moot to say everybody is free to do what they want with what they have (be it money or not) because that's not how we live nor want to live.
A proposal to take from an inidivual for the greater good can be worth a discussion. Just crying out for extremist, reality-ignoring individualism is not an acceptable comment worthy of HN, in my eyes.
Please, let's discuss proposals, but reasonably and with thoughtful arguments, and not with "? It's his money that he actually decided to give away why should you or I have a say in it?".
AFAIK, France is currently collecting ownership tax.
The USSR and North Korea suck because they are autocratic, corrupted regimes, not because of single aspects of how they run their economies.
But even beside specific examples, if we decide that it is a good thing, then we can introduce new law.
http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ID/Netherlands-Individual-Income...
As an abstraction, I like to think of money as crystalized human effort. Society makes decisions by the power of individual behavior in aggregate.
A bunch of people buy a ~new thing~. Over time and at scale, society creates a river of money towards the ~new thing~. Its depth and breadth calibrated to reward other people for working towards bringing that ~new thing~ to society. Entrepreneurs gather marketing, sales and laborers to build a village by the river. This is society's intuitive understanding of business.
Society's intuitive understanding of competition between villages is that it occurs as an innovation arms race. Lower prices, better products are the result.
The experienced village builder learns that the best way to win is to divert the river into a cave and build a moat around the entrance.
Patent portfolios, information asynchrony, non compete employee contracts, vendor lock-in, yearly subscriptions, Byzantine government regulations and a hundred other things deepen your moat.
These kinds of moats improve your margin -- but in a different way than what society is used to. It isn't resulting in better products at lower prices, it's making competition more difficult.
Other experienced builders try to take a tiny drop from every river, for every transaction. They're starting to build their villages vertically and profit from the organically grown river network. Exploiting insider knowledge on the foreign exchange market, transaction fees, whatever.
These kinds of businesses intercept money that would normally return to society when the people in the villages go home.
The village builders have begun consolidating and moving upstream, getting closer to society. Society has BENEFITED. Their desires are now easier and faster to fulfill than ever before!
And yet.. society (remember, people in aggregate) is starting to get weary. Most people are restless and anxious, despite full employment, stock market blowing up, etc. Your average person can feel the reservoir getting lower, while other people are filling lakes.
"U.S. consumer spending rises; savings drop to 10-year low".
Money is power. Your average run of the mill person is slowly shifting from a belief in the Virtuousness of the American System, Land of Opportunity to one of Powerlessness within inevitability of whatever that system hands you.
Ultimate power is derived from a mandate from a masses, and most people on some level know that! They just feel like they're strapped in to a slow motion train wreck, and they're afraid of how it's all going to end.
Just my opinion on why people might have the audacity to discuss and critique how some billionaires spend their money.
This is my biggest critique about charities, but if there are transparent rules and processes that can be fixed. But in general, I think the govt would be a in a better position to serve their people than charities would.
On the other hand, they have funded studies that try to dispel that global warming is real, and they have been accused of having undue influence on colleges they give grants to.
There are also billionaires who use their fortune to actively influence politics (in a way that is probably mostly beneficial to themselves - such as the Koch family supporting Trump). There must also be lots of billionaires who, just by passively remaining billionaires and taking no broader responsibility, add to the problem.
I'm making no judgement - here at least - on whether Trump is an idiot or not.
In this case the cause they 'care about' is getting the most good out of each dollar. We have to ask why democratic/government giving does not have the same goal. Answering this question may very well lead to the conclusion that having some non-democratically controlled donors is better for everyone.
Instead of trying to tackle problems of wealth inequality in such a roundabout bureaucratic way, why not just start directly dividing income up more evenly with your employees to begin with?
Until he acts it's just marketing.
Buffet, Gates etc. always say they should be taxed more but I haven't heard of them actively supporting candidates and causes that will actually do this. If they really want it to change they have a lot of power (money) to influence politicans and help make it happen.
It's undemocratic, but is it actually worse? Looking at the results of democratic processes, I'm not so sure the answer is yes. Democracy optimizes for the popular, the sensational, the scandalous. The hard work on the ground that Bill & Melinda put in doesn't square with that model. The public has the attention span of a toddler; they just aren't captivated by a decades-long vaccination and prevention campaign against malaria or river blindness.
Now look at the top 10% (minus the top 1%). That's the income range of $100-350k. They have 25% of the U.S. income--$4 trillion. In Europe, these folks are taxed like rich people. In Germany, individual income above 52,000 Euro is taxed at 42% (the highest marginal rate is 45%). In the U.S., these people have been redefined as "middle class." The tax rate is just 24% up to $150,000. If you taxed these folks as the Germans do, you could raise maybe half a trillion dollars in extra revenue.
Talking about the tax rate of billionaires is a red herring. It's not tax cuts for billionaires that are keeping us from increasing NIH spending, etc. It's tax cuts for ordinary rich people.
This is just the federal tax rate. What about state taxes? What about cost of living? Healthcare?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
Coming from a country where nearly everything that can be recycled gets recycled, and having seen this change take place in a span of less than 30 years, your assumption does seem a bit too pessimistic.
The same kind of pessimistic assumption underlines the ridiculously high death tolls that people often predict will be caused by global warming. Most of those deaths are attributed to infectious diseases such as malaria. This assumes that humanity will not find a way to prevent and/or cure such diseases on a large scale in the next 100 years.
The number of people who recycle a lot is quite small in relation to the total population. Is the increase in recycling enough to offset the increase in trash and toxins? I'm skeptical that this will happen soon enough.
Since you come from a country where nearly everything is recycled I'm going to assume you come from a wealthy country. If so then you, yes you, consume far more than most humans. You are a drain on the resources of the planet. Your consumption leads to strip mining, deforestation, and industrial pollution. This damage has been conveniently shipped off to poor regions of the world but the ultimate cause is consumers like you and I. Your recycling hardly makes up for the damage that is done for your consumption.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
From the above article:
“If the levels of consumption that...the most affluent people enjoy today were replicated across even half of the roughly 9 billion people projected to be on the planet in 2050, the impact on our water supply, air quality, forests, climate, biological diversity, and human health would be severe.”
I'm pointing out that both are assumptions pulled out of thin air, and that we should not be too quick to get all pessimistic (or optimistic) based on mere assumptions.
People 100 years ago could not have had imagined the kind of technological and sociopolitical changes that we take for granted now. What more right do we have to make assumptions about what we'll have 100 years from now? Heck, I can't even trust anyone who says what will happen 10 years from now, whether good or bad.
Let's stop pretending to be prophets and actually start working on the problems. Only then will we know which of the assumptions were correct.
A quarter century later, cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, averting the horse shit crisis. Not because people heeded the warning, but simply because cars were faster and sexier. Of course, we've just traded CO2 for horse shit, and now we've got a different problem.
If history is any indication of what will happen in the future, we'll probably trade some other type of pollution for CO2 this century, and then another type.
Also, I was talking about solely about CO2. I was talking about deforestation, massive dumping of toxins, plastics and other forms of waste. It is without a doubt that at current trends humanity’s future is dire,
I'm somewhat hopeful that we are in the middle of the time when that start changing, but until it does, I think it's quite clear that things have gotten worse, not better.
On a side note, please don't make people ask for essential information, just state it right away.
This book argues that a dollar goes a lot farther in the third world. (Obviously.)
It also has a great story about how money spent on educational resources can have almost no effect while money spent on deworming (yes, worms) can greatly increase educational results. (Not so obvious.) This is a third world example but its fairly obvious the problems with US education aren't' resource or efficiency based.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168483-the-most-good-y...
It's clear that Bill and Melinda Gates are practicing effective altruism in an effort to do the most good with their money.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-roll...
(I work on these issues on what's apparently the other side from him.)
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-on-cryptocurrency-...
Anyway, plenty of heros broke the law. Revolutionaries, civil rights activists etc. I'm sure Gates and many other rich people would agree that many such figures qualify as heroes.
That of course doesn't mean that everyone who breaks the law, every revolutionary, every civil rights activist is a hero, far from it, and crucially does not get us any closer to deciding whether Snowden is a hero.
I think this is an awful question with awful answers.
I wouldn't dispute that having enough skill/education to offer value to the global/US marketplace is critical, but I have some doubt about whether what we call "college education" is the way really large numbers of people (not just the elite) can obtain that skill/education.
Maybe we're over investing in an outdated, inefficient process and it will never be good enough.
1-Invest in bridging the last mile gap for broadband.
2-Clear headed planning to address the fundamental employment issues undermining labor/per capital wealth.
—-there aren’t enough jobs to employ everyone given current market conditions. Ie lower the full time/OT line to 20-30 hours or so and make better support systems (healthcare for all, housing projects for all that aren’t crimes dens)
—-make programs to help college students prepare, correctly for the labor force.
It should take a lot of nerve to open this way. Sympathy, or I guess we call it empathy, who knows, cannot be achieved through optimism alone. The unfettered optimism in this intro seems tone-deaf. I think it undermines the effort they make to the contrary.
Sure, saying there isn’t anything we can do about it is irresponsible, and so is the lack of nuance of “the world is fucked”.
Is this the only alternative you can imagine?
>Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.
That is not what optimism is.
If you can not identify problems, you are multitudes more unlikely to solve them. My critique is as basic as that.
Just because Americans are shooting up schools doesn't mean that the lives of people in some other parts of this planet haven't improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years alone.
No you won't. You will select some questions you like, and answer them. They will not necessarily be the "best" (whatever that means... according to what criteria??) or the ones most people would like to see answered. Just the ones you feel like answering.
A more democratic system would be to let people vote for questions, and promise to answer the ones with the most upvotes. Or maybe (why not) offer to answer ALL questions.
Internet "democratic voting" sounds great in theory but history has shown that in practice, it just gets hijacked.[1]
Basically, the top most upvoted question would end up being, "What is Bill and Melinda's favorite sex position?" ... or something similar.
[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/52524/15-polls-hijacked-inter...
That said, while those questions are close to the big tough question, I don't think their answers really addressed them in an adequately thoughtful way.
(I think the Gates Foundation is mostly making good choices with their philanthropy, but maybe we just got lucky. How about [Soros|Koch] (pick whichever you like least)?)
If one doesn't like the idea of Internet voting or answering all questions, then let them hold a press conference with real journalists. But this is not it; this is nothing; this is a show with pictures of the couple laughing and showing a serious face in front of poor people; this is just marketing.
An interesting question would be, how do you justify speciesism[1].
When they describe how they're "optimists" and how the world is getting "better", they're obviously only talking about humans. The world is getting much much worse for every species of living things, except (some) humans, so the only way to consider that the world is indeed getting better in general is to consider that humans are so superior to any other living thing that any amount of suffering / extinction of other species is more than offset by the marginal utility we get out of it.
If you're religious, maybe your religion offers a way to accept that (depending on the religion).
But if, like the Gates (or me), you're atheists, how does this work exactly?
I personally admire such people, but maybe that is not the right way for everyone. If you consider helping others as all-or-nothing choices in the end less people may be willing to help, so being a bit more lenient likely has overall beneficial effects.
What is the lowest hanging fruit of all time? Right, the night-time ads on TV with poor children in a foreign country.
What is the least imaginative way of helping a developed nation? 'Better education'. Sigh.
Really? We just need to stop children from dying, educate the parents, and everything will be fine?
It's not that people are pessimistic - they are just REALISTIC, about what a crock of shit they're being handed, and Bill and Melinda's answer is to meet Steven Pinker and go 'hey, statistics show that everything's better than it ever was!' My god... We're talking billionaires, having no ideas, no imagination, and no idea that they have neither, and wondering why things kind of suck?
Because people with no ideas, no imagination, are the ones who get to make billions of dollars in our society? Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with it Bill...
Except you'd still have cancer.
When someone got you to a doctor, who operated on you quickly and saved your life, you'd not only consider the person who got you to the doctor insightful, but far more helpful than Melinda, and be rightfully outraged at Melinda's well-meaning but clueless efforts to help you.
I am the person getting you to the doctor, Melinda is Melinda Gates, and the insightful bit is figuring out what cancer is, and what a doctor would be, in this metaphor.
Melinda and Gates think it's lack of education in the USA. You tell me.
Bill is not really a smart guy in my standing. May be one could argue that he is smart in a narrow band - that of making money. I certainly can think of a few of my acquaintances who can be more creative than him in ways to "help" others.
Bill Gates was never a good guy, and I don't really give a Fuck if most of you reading this don't like me saying this because you forgot what the word hacker really means because there are too many businesspeople here pretending to be hackers here instead of the other way around.
You run Windows. Your mind belongs to us. Your ability to think beyond .NET and C# will soon diminish, and we will give you some mediocre job now based on your mediocre proprietary skills, and your role as a tech worker now be to spread your love for MS to everyone, because if you don't we will stop paying you, and you will have no food and no home. And you will not know how to use anything but Windows.
This is hilarious. What OS do you think Google, Facebook and the NSA run?
At the end of the day Gates wanted to sell products for money, straight up cash transaction, take it or leave it. Google et al are sly and underhanded, you don’t know the price upfront, they try to turn you into the product...
So, you are basically trying to say that proprietary is better because we don't know what the open source version costs? Well, you have the source code... so I guess you may not be willing to look inside, but the other one you don't have the option to even look.
It is not free, unless you think Google is made of unpaid volunteers and all its shareholders are charities?
You are Gates’ customer, but you are Google’s inventory
Or here:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/
Compile it and run it, you are inventory of Google for compiling free source code that you can modify however you want? Where do you get the source code like that to compile for Windows?
2) you have no assurance that that’s what running on the handset nor what’s in the firmware or the driver binary blobs
Here is the license for Android:
https://source.android.com/setup/licenses
Where is the license for Winblows?
How about we meet in the middle and agree that in terms of impact and spectrum he is a pretty amazing example of what you can experience in a single life?
As an aside, Microsoft's failure in the mobile world combined with the pervasiveness of both phones and their vector for surveillance suggests that others are far more responsible for the concerns you voice. I do agree with you that when we have one or a few players choking key points the system is rife for abuse, whether that's the device, the network provider or the OS manufacturer.