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ggreer

Before the Gates Foundation and The Giving Pledge, billionaires usually did three things:

1. Buy fancy yachts.

2. Continue running the business that made them rich.

3. Spend a token amount on a feel-good charity. The Foundation to Prevent Euthanasia of Cute Puppies or Whatever.

Gates has managed to convince them of another option:

4. Spend wealth to alleviate large causes of suffering that few/no groups are working on.

More than 3.3 million people who would have died of malaria are alive today.

I realize he can't take full responsibility for that, but considering all he's done, Bill Gates is a living saint.

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Rockefeller and Carnegie were donating vast sums of money to many different charities long ago. I wouldn't call either of their donation efforts "feel good".

I'm aware of both. I said, "usually" and I was talking about contemporary billionaires.

Both Carnegie and Rockefeller had a sense of effective philanthropy. I find it very impressive that Carnegie managed to spend 90% of his assets before he died.

Howard Hughes? I think he wanted to the avoid taxes but his investment is still paying dividends today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute

It has a $17 billion endowment.

Actually, there are other large endowments if you look on the list.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_foundation...

Gates is comparable with Rockfeller, in the sense that they both had extremely dodgy ways of doing business and managed to create huge monopolies.

Your descriptions are utterly out of whack with objective reality, and Gates's philantropy is very much in-line with Gilded Age philantropists like Rockfeller, Carnegie, Eastman or Rosenwald. Hell, Rockfeller very specifically championed and helped lead efforts against malaria (amongst many other causes).

Yes, Gates believes that philanthropy can be part of solutions to alleviate social problems[1]. While most people don't agree to that, at least he is doing something one way or the other.

[1] http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capit...

I don't think most people have any opinion whatsoever about how social problems can be alleviated. What makes you think they would not not believe in philantropy's effectiveness? I have never heard such a claim.

I know many people, especially in Europe, who think that while philanthropy can do good and offer assistance, only a concerted government led effort can offer any sort of permanent alleviation to social problems.

> Bill Gates is a living saint.

Maybe he just feels he has a lot to give back after what he did in the business world ?

    1. Earn shitloads by monopolistically holding 
       back a decade of innovation in the rich west.
    2. Give all of it to the poor.

If anything, that sounds like Robin Hood to me, more than anything else.

1. innovation does not only benefit the "rich west" - computers are everywhere, man.

2. I doubt he has given "all" of his fortune to the poor.

3. Robin Hood is a legend.

> 1. innovation does not only benefit the "rich west" - computers are everywhere, man.

While this is true, the evidence so far is that innovation (at least of the kind we have been engaging in) benefits the rich far more than the poor.

> While this is true, the evidence so far is that innovation (at least of the kind we have been engaging in) benefits the rich far more than the poor.

Oh yeah ? Do you ignore the fact that even in the poorest countries people have mobile phones and connect with online services though it ? This has completely changed how they network in the past 10 years. The West is not the only harbour where innovation stops.

1. Sure thing, but if you can choose between "faster computers" and "cure malaria" then I'd wager that's pretty easy - except of course when you're called Ray Kurzweil.

In many ways this was Rockefeller's motivation. He believed it was his Christian duty to earn as much money as he could and use it according to biblical principles.

>More than 3.3 million people who would have died of malaria are alive today.

This does make him sound like a saint, but is number of lives saved really a good metric? I mean, what's the quality of life like for these three million people, what's their life expectancy?

I know this makes me sound like a horrible person but I think keeping extremely poor people barely alive looks good as a statistic and there's more worthy causes to spend our efforts on in those areas where malaria is prevalent.

Heh. I predicted a comment like this would be here before I even opened the comments page. "Getting rid of malaria is nice and all, but those people will still be poor." (I also expected, "Are we really sure that saving the lives of so many people is a good idea?", but fortunately that comment isn't here yet.)

It's difficult to have much empathy for people whose lives are so far removed from our own. For most of us, cancer is the boogeyman: most of the people here have had at least one friend or relative affected by it. What would you say to someone that suggested that saving the lives of cancer victims wasn't a worthy cause?

> ...there's more worthy causes to spend our efforts on in those areas where malaria is prevalent.

You are welcome to spend your efforts wherever you like. Gates has decided to spend his efforts on malaria. There is no room for an "our" there, unless you are a significant part of the Gates Foundation. I'm grateful that the mob doesn't get to decide how Gates spends his resources.

I think this might be a moot point.

Malaria doesn't just kill. It maims. It scars families and communities. It impairs people's ability to earn. Childhood sickness inhibits the development all sorts of robustness later in life from physical strength to intellectual development. It makes certain areas underserved by public services and for profit services. It closes the doors to industries like tourism. etc. etc.

These measures aren't just extending life at the expense of quality. That's more of an advanced medicine concern.

Yeah, I spent a while hanging out in Malawi where malaria is rife and it's a nice place with friendly English speaking people but very poor to a large extent due to the malaria. If you fixed the malaria things would be much better there.

> This does make him sound like a saint, but is number of lives saved really a good metric? I mean, what's the quality of life like for these three million people, what's their life expectancy?

You can't really be improving living conditions of people who are dead can you. So it's a first step.

More people isn't necessarily a good way to improve living conditions, however. It is pretty common for deer populations to become unhealthy when predators are removed, for example, since with no predators they just over produce and then they all starve due to lack of tree bark. You end up with a sickly, miserable population.

Then be glad that someone else did not apply this principle to you.

After all, maybe someone out there in the world thinks that 1 person / km2 ought to be enough. Who's to say that you wouldn't be in his "TO TERMINATE" list?

And these are humans you're talking about, not deer.

Oh I can assure you that the people of Africa have plenty of predators, not least of which are the IMF and World Bank.

Humans have more children to make up for the children who die. With fewer deaths come fewer births, to the point where many developed nations have a negative birth rate.

What if some of the poverty in these countries is because people die young/unexpectedly? Lots of people dying can't be good for the economy. What if curing the deaths helps the quality of life?

If less children die of sickness people have less children and can feed them better.

Say that to someone whose life has been saved! You don't need to be rich to be happy. Who are you to judge the value of someone else's life?

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