2015 Gates Annual Letter
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
2. African crop yield - If US can grow 159 bushels of corn per acre, and African countries are currently at 29, why is the 15 year goal for African countries only 48 bushels per acre instead of somewhere close to the US? Is that because of tech-transfer difficulties or rather the soil/environment?
3. Mobile banking - Wish US would get on with it too. All the problems he listed apply to the poor in US too. There is no way for me to immediately send $100 to anyone in the US without resorting to BTC or wire-transfers. Even with https://www.clearxchange.com/ it still takes 2-3 days.
4. Software for education - Couldn't agree more. However, I'm still not sure if we've achieved the correct "global education" format yet. Check out these two KA links: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/roman... and https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history-basics/Ar... - the first reads like a dull Wikipedia page with nested commenting for interaction and the other is a droll Youtube edutainment video. Is this really going to help a 16 year old in Vietnam, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone learn about Art History especially if they cannot understand the accents or localized references? I'm not suggesting that every video or text be translated/localized but before we aim for better software, we should at least figure out the format first. What if you are 12 year old and want to learn the same topic? What if you are 34 with two degrees in sciences? If online education was space exploration, we are in the Wright-brothers stage, decades from even Wernher von Braun stage. Instead of every major university just uploading their video lectures and syllabi online, I'd love to see someone try to create a real global school (non-commercial) that presents the education material fit for each learner. I don't mean tests like what KA is doing but the course material itself.
Irrigation probably presents the biggest barrier, especially in the Northern equatorial regions of Africa. Once you're utilizing 100% of the water available you can't grow anything else.
Sure you could get _an_ African farmer to American level yields, but that's different than what essentially is economic reorganization for the _majority_ of workers in African economies.
Also, remember this isn't an agile software project that can go through an iteration a day. You plant once a year, you harvest once a year; an entire continent doubling yields in only 15 iterations is pretty good.
Many areas of the world where yields are low suffer not only form lack of money and technology but property rights are likely as significant.
A buddy of mine actually has a start-up that focuses on that called Suyo: http://suyo.co/
the west is facing a population crunch, as ladies are spending their more fertile years studying.
Paypal? Venmo?
But apparently you can use Western Union to send actual cold hard cash anywhere immediately. I know, I was surprised too, wouldn't know if my girlfriend didn't work there.
None of these options are free or close to free.
In most developed countries, it's completely free to send money instantly from one account to another, even across banks and account holders.
Not sure specifically what you mean by wire transfers but in the UK I can open my banks app (or websites), enter the sort code and account number of a person and instantly transfer them money from my account for no charge. Is this not possible in the US?
Might be another cultural difference. In the UK I can open a bank regardless of credit, there is no minimum balance or service fees unless I go negative into an un-arranged overdraft.
You register your mobile phone number on bank website (all Swedish banks offer this service) & download your security certificate on your cell phone or computer.
And from now on you can not only send money to any other mobile phone (via Swish [1]) but you can use your Mobile-ID/Bank-ID to login to every Govt/Private website/app.
Almost every company offers login via Mobile/Bank-ID. Guess what? I can sign off my taxes, parental leaves, sick leaves and whatnot just using the same MobileID. I don't create any logins/password on any Swedish websites at all. Transferring money isn't any exception.
(I was very surprised when I moved to the US and realized that changing your address here means going to every single government agency and business you have a relationship with, and independently changing your address with them, instead of just doing it once in the central registry. I also found out that apparently you can't change your name on your driver's license if you have unpaid parking tickets. This is hilarious and unfathomable to me)
The mobile bank-id is still passcode-protected. The way it works is that whenever I want to sign on to one of these sites, I just enter my public personal id number. The app will then wake up, tell me that someone wants to identify as me on site X, and to enter my passcode if that's correct. If you steal my phone and don't have my passcodes, you can't do that. And I can revoke existing certificates if my phone gets stolen so they don't work even if you know my passcode.
BTC is not immediate either, it takes several days to cash out through an exchange because it will ultimately be settled with you through ACH.
Here in Canada the way to do it is an "email money transfer" where you put in someone's email address, and they get an email with a link they have to click then put in their online banking username/password in the page it takes them to. It's nasty, though it does work.
That seems to be a problem of incompetence and politics and not of technology though. I remember a few friends in school messaging each other by making 1ct money transfers to each other with their banks mobile app.
One factor (apart from soil type/access and amounts of water/available tech) might also be this: maybe Gates is considering the environmental impact of growing those 159 bushels just isn't worth it. Without the heavy use of pesticides, fertilizers etc the yield would be lower, but the impact on nature would be much more reasonable and sustainable.
A lot of African farmed land is heavily populated. In a small area you can have hundreds of farmers with tiny fields that have to support numerous people. That makes agriculture and the environment more of a social issue than a technical one. It is hard to imagine this in the west where the countryside has very few people and is farmed almost exclusively by machines. In this context yield is less important as a metric compared to how the land is delivering nutrional value. If the goal is to give local people a healthy diet then western food technoloogy can be very inappropriate.
This is great, obviously, but overpopulation is a huge problem and regrettably that problem will now get worse. The predictions for the maximum population expected at mid-century have recently been adjusted upwards. Resources will be depleted ever more quickly if poor people get as rich as Bill predicts.
I have no answer. Surely we cannot withhold medecine from poor people to prevent overpopulation. But two decades from now overpopulation will be the major worry on everybody's mind if this trend continues.
Edit: The assumption of negative growth once countries hit a certain level of development/stability/richness has recently stopped being true [1], I probably should have mentioned that in my first comment
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
I remain a perpetual technological optimist, we'll solve this problem as well.
Btw, it's very hard not to read your comment like "wouldn't it be better for everyone if all these poor people just died off...?"
That being said it also seems that there is an immediate correlation between suddenly higher income and a individual family unit also increasing (i.e. when a family gets a sudden, large increase in income they will generally also increase their family size at that time).
So, with all of that being said, since in the words of the Gates this is a "bet", we could also potentially bet that by increasing the number of middle class individuals within a given population we will also see an overall increase in birthrate among those populations.
The correlation doesn't seem to hold at the high end, and much of the data in the western world confounds population growth due to fertility (still low) with population growth due to immigration (which has upticked across the board in recent years). As far as I know, though, the effect is still strong in the delta range that the Gates foundation is targeting.
Furthermore, depletion of resources is not a simple numbers game: a rich person produces several orders more CO2 than a poor person to name just one example. If Africa becomes wealthy enough to come anywhere close to Americans for meat consumption there is going to be a huge issue.
Population control of some kind is so much easier now than if we wait 20 years and Chinese-like draconian measures become necessary.
1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329882.800-global-po...
"These new predictions are drawing criticism. "Raftery's projections are too high for Africa, because they don't include the fact that female education is the key driver of fertility decline," says Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria."
And getting yields to that point has come at the cost of an environmental and social catastrophe in the US. It's also uneconomically expensive - though it's easy not to notice because the government pays junk food companies to buy the excess and feed it to us at ultra-low prices.
Why on earth would you want to inflict that on Africa too?
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critiq...
- A very large percentage of Vietnamese students wouldn't be able to understand KA's videos because of their English proficiency.
- Even if the content was translated & subtitled, the videos' topics were in a way "foreign" to most of the students, especially the K1-K12's videos
- Other players like Udacity, Coursera ,... mainly focused on specific topics and that will be more relevant to Vietnamese students/workers, say software developers. But again, it's only relevant to those students with pretty good understanding of their field's terminologies in English. Those students are the minority.
- Say, if I were to start a trello's clone, I would have little chance against trello because most of Vietnamese would be able to use trello with out any problems, so yeah, they might prefer trello.
So starting a KA clone would be "safer". And on top of that, I've always been passionate about software & education & English language, so I started it. I started with English courses, which I thought were what the Vietnamese students would need most in their career later in life.
So in case anyone thinking of making a KA clone like me, please read on. It's not an easy journey at all, especially when your resources are limited. Building the platform AND the content at the same time is real tough. It's not easy to convince good (English) teachers to go online and give lessons. Giving lessons offline is still fairly lucrative for good English teachers. Or they are shy acting in front of the camera and going to be seen by "everyone". Or they are not passionate enough a teacher. Or they simply didn't believe in us.
I haven't been successful yet, still struggling but the journey's been great and I'm really proud of what we've built: a stable platform (has most of the features from KA or udacity), found 2 young passionate English teachers and together we've built a few English courses.
So yes, that's my startup journey so far. The final results? 2015 will tell, right now we're running a little short of cash but I'm hopeful. Sometimes I just wish I was Salman Khan and met "that" investor, Bill Gates. Gates' note on online education is exactly what I've been thinking as well: It is still at an early stage and improvising for maybe 10 years to come.
Online education usually already requires some educational foundations -- an app to help you learn trigonometry might be effective, but I doubt that an app to help you learn to read would be very effective. I also think that young children in this age-group tend to learn more by watching, interacting with, and mimicking adults than from objects. The educational foundations of the primary school level will likely have to be supplied by adults.
-- Elon Musk (chatting with Sal Khan)[1]
I think there's a ton of improvement to be had in the education space. People have used technology to make many forms of entertainment more compelling, but education is pretty similar to half a century ago: classrooms, teachers, lectures, etc. A lot of the stagnation is due to bureaucratic and legislative inertia, which isn't such a big problem in countries lacking widespread public schooling.
With regards to cost and bandwidth issues: Remember, Gates's predictions/goals are for the next 15 years. Technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. In 2000, iPods didn't exist. In 2030, even low-end tablets will put current hardware to shame.
It is an excellent medium to teach a class withe.
Malawi app 'teaches UK pupils 18 months of maths in six weeks' : http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29063614
> Gray is mostly right: forager kids learn all they need when free to play all day, forager adults work all they need without toiling, and kids can learn modern skills this way today. But there is no net trend toward free schools, and I expect a wholesale move would be a disaster. Yes, it works for some students, including most who stay until they graduate at free schools, but parents of kids for whom it doesn’t work probably pull their kids out. And free school graduates probably avoid the ugly jobs schools were designed to make kids accept. School isn’t about learning “material,” school is about learning to accept workplace domination and ranking, and tolerating long hours of doing boring stuff exactly when and how you are told. Others seem to agree: - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-lear...
To suggest that all children need to develop fully is a tablet with exciting learning materials is to ignore that learning is a social activity (both in reference to learning about/from the people around you, as well as learning from the recorded knowledge of others).
However, global warming is such a big and immediate issue — we have until 2017 to start reducing carbon dioxide output, after that we lock in >2C dangerous, irreversible warming — that despite all the progress being made in developing countries today, the effects of climate change are likely to negate much of that work in the future.
Gates is bound by capitalist ideology, his emphasis on the need to develop a 'miracle cure' source of energy is evidence of that — we have the technology we need to solve the problem today, but it will require a fundamental shift of focus and wealth. We are putting profit before the place we live. We are betting big on the miracle cure in the future. What if the miracle never happens?
edit: I've written a post with a bit more detail and sources: https://shamocracy.org/2015/01/22/2015-gates-annual-letter/
Reduce emissions in two years? You may as well ask everyone to breathe less. No civilization has voluntarily reduced its resource consumption. China and India (along with the developing world) are more than offsetting any minor reductions by OECD countries.[1]
If the situation is as dire as you suggest, the only solution to global warming is technological. Compared to carbon-neutral energy, fossil fuels are cheaper and more convenient to use. Until that's not the case, CO2 emissions will continue to increase.
1. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/GCP/images/countries_co2_emissions.jpg
Absolutely I agree that we can't solve the problem of global warming in the West alone, it's a global problem that needs a global solution. I do not agree there is zero chance of it being implemented, but it will be hard work. The problem humanity faces today is a concentration of power and control, exhibited by the growing inequality in the world (the latest figures from Oxfam show the top 1% now have 48% of the wealth, forecast to pass 50% next year, and 80 people have the same wealth as 50% of the worlds population). It is a system that is rigged against the people and environment for the purposes of wealth generation for the few. It is a system that it's proponents truly believe in, and who deny the reality of climate change because if they are wrong, their whole model collapses. But things are changing, and fast. Particularly in the UK at the moment we are seeing the rapid ascent of the Green Party, particularly among young voters, as the population is becoming fed up of the establishment and austerity. The Green Party's message is 'The politics of the future doesn't have to look like the politics of the past'.
Leaving the market to solve the problem is clearly not working, we need substantial government intervention. Things like 'polluter pays' taxation and not allowing global trade agreements to take precedence over activities that would produce a lower net output of carbon dioxide like localised food production and subsidised, localised renewable energy production.
I strongly recommend reading Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything' for a background on the history, current situation, future solutions and what will happen if we don't take action. http://thischangeseverything.org/
This is the reason that the 1970s overpopulation doom scenarios never came to pass. And it is the reason that foundations today focus on improving health and living standards, rather than birth rates specifically.
http://openlmis.org (*full disclosure I'm involved here and we could use help organizing a community)
Generalized data collection:
SMS:
Feel free to get in touch and we can see if something makes sense - hans@ilovezoona.com.
(Same goes for anyone else reading this! Depending on your interests, may be able to link you to a few other projects doing some interesting stuff)
But the presentation is awful. Why do sites feel the need to hijack my scroll wheel?
But first few times I visited the site, I got just a subscription box as main page content. I actually typed in a random e-mail, got "Thanks!" as a reply, and that was all.
By dollar value, maybe, but adjusted for inflation they aren't even close.
Rockefeller's wealth peaked at between $1 and $2 billion, according to the best records on him, including his biographies and records from the Rockefeller Archives. Inflation adjusting those numbers based on the 1890-1910 time frame in which the dollar was extremely stable for the most part, you get between $20 (20x$1b) and $60 (30x$2b) billion, depending on if you want to use the low ball on his wealth plus a low ball on the inflation adjustment vs the opposite end of the spectrum.
http://www.businessinsider.com/richest-people-in-history-201...