Dude, wtf. How about a private juvenile detention centers ran by a company with a history of child abuse in those prisons? At least more due diligence?
Meanwhile: if you're going to manage a forty billion dollar endowment to maximize its impact on global poverty and disease, you're going to be working with large-scale corporate debt and equity. It would be very difficult to maintain diversified exposure to those markets without investing in something that would piss someone off.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=rbanffy+m...
But you're getting yourself into trouble in this argument, because Bill Gates self-evidently hasn't abused any juveniles, but actually is working to cure polio.
So, tell me the difference in his money going to companies that abuse juveniles for profit and his money going to companies that try to eradicate polio. He is not eradicating polio himself either - he pays people to do so.
That seems like a pretty relevant distinction to me, but, hey, if we weren't arguing over private prisons, you'd be telling me how evil Coca Cola (another foundation investment) is instead, because the real point here is spelled out in your HN profile.
The Microsoft you dislike still exists, and, worse, has communicated itself spiritually to other tech giants. It is downright weird that you'd focus your attention instead on something that really is exclusively an effort to work on global poverty and disease.
But surely a for-profit juvenile detention center is a bit of a stretch? And the other private prison the Foundation invested in listed "reductions in crime rates" as one of the risks to its bottom line. Surely common sense (or better-than-common in the case of Gates) would lead you to not invest in a company that literally grows with the crime rate... I find it hard to believe that it was so hard to find viable investments that they had stoop to investing in private prisons.
The Gates Foundation is awesome, but that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. And hopefully they might consider being slightly stricter in deciding which investments they are morally opposed to if they are currently investing in private prisons.
Consider that juvenile abuse is endemic in the entire juvenile justice system, and that (a) a reasonable person might believe that private prison systems are actually more accountable for abuse, since the market can respond to their mismanagement (and because it is far easier to sue a private enterprise than a government agency), and (b) the statistics could conceivably bear this out. I don't know. My problem with private prisons has to do with incentive alignment. But maybe Richard Henriques disagrees with me?
Remember: the Gates Foundation endowment is basically a large private hedge fund that happens to have a charity as its beneficiary rather than a bunch of rich old dudes. The expectation that it be managed differently than any other fund clearly exists, but I'm not sure why that explanation would be valid. There are probably a bunch of universities that hold that private prison stock too.
But here's where we get back to how silly the article is, especially here on this thread: that private prison company is a tiny fraction of the endowment's equity portfolio. It isn't even listed above the fold in the article! The article concerns itself with the suggestion that any support of western consumerist capitalism is hypocrisy on the part of the Gates Foundation. What makes me think that? Because the first page of the article concerns itself with the Foundation's investment in Coke, McD's, BK, Taco Bell, and Pepsi. The article has an unmistakeable and ridiculous thesis.