Bill Gates on His Foundation's Health and Education Campaigns

Given the question asked, it's a reasonably fair swipe, though. I don't think there is much to argue against: Vaccination and eradication of diseases has a more direct effect than access to broadband on health. The secondary effect of fighting disease broadband is a reduction of poverty which will both lead to better health.

So not sure why the swipe part is added to the title here on HN.

> When we get into a field, we do take a point of view, and raising controversy is a symptom. Fortunately, there is what’s called the charter school format that lets you try new things. The system is good at shutting down the ones that don’t work and replicating the ones that do. The big actor is government. If somebody says somebody is too big, it would be strange to point to us.

What a load of shit. What Gates is trying to do isn't using a small number of charter schools as a laboratory for discovering news approaches to education that are more effective, which was the original idea of charter schools. Rather, he is trying to replace most of the public schools for low-income minorities with privatized charter schools, and he wants to be the one person who gets to create the criteria that determine whether a given school is doing well or not.

Here are the actual criticisms of his agenda that the article is likely referring to (with an added quote on his malaria work to illustrate the point):

http://pastebin.com/XUxCmdiN

His foundation makes great play of the claim that they are evidence based and totally, totally use metrics and quantitative feedback to guide their work.

So I go onto their site and look for such metrics, feedback, evidence that they have change their policies and practices based on data.

Nothing.

> In the U.S., if we have an education system where the inner-city kid and the suburban kid have equal opportunity, that would be a huge contribution.

I feel like this isn't the best metric and could have unintended consequences.

Even though I don't really agree with him, his slam here was great:

> Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into.

I really don't understand how that comment section could come from typical BusinessWeek readers.

When BillG ran Microsoft, he was a total asshole. Now he's trying to be remembered in a positive light, but he's still thin skinned when it comes to competition.