
Melinda Gates at Stanford: "All lives have equal value" - lominming
http://blog.minming.net/post/35762604294/melinda-gates-at-stanford
======
oboizt
I agree that travel can definitely open our eyes to various conditions outside
our own culture.

However, the cost of travelling often could be put directly towards donations.
There are so many opportunities to serve close to home in our own communities
that often get overlooked because that kind of volunteering doesn't sound as
glamorous as building schools in Africa.

~~~
Pwnguinz
Giving money to charitable organizations that have 30~% waste ratio isn't the
way to go.

What you want are driven, motivated and open-minded individuals that can
create disruptive innovation; entrepreneurs.

Edit: typos.

~~~
pretoriusB
> _What you want are driven, motivated and open-minded individuals that can
> created disruptive innovation; entrepreneurs._

As if the problems of the third world are not already in large part created by
greedy enterprises operating there?

~~~
wheels
No, mostly not. At least not without help from regional oligarchs or
colonialists. There's very little utility to the west in most of Africa being
poor. Like, most of sub-saharan Africa isn't especially resource rich, their
food production isn't very efficient so we don't source much of that, nor do
we outsource much labor there.

Economic growth is pretty clearly the most effective means of lifting
populations out of poverty. In the early steps it often looks pretty ugly (as
industrialization did in the now rich countries), but it works, over time.
It'd be hard to argue at the moment that China is getting the short end of the
stick in their economic relationship to the west. Being poor sucks, and the
kind of work poor people get usually sucks, but taking away that suckage for
the most part requires helping people become not poor rather than trying to
ease the suckage of being poor.

South Korea and Taiwan are both interesting case studies in development --
both were impoverished about 30-40 years ago and are modern, rich democracies
now. When I was a kid, Taiwan sounded like a magical country. The only way I
knew of it was that every toy I'd ever owned seemed to have been made there.

Contrary to the grandparent's statement, entrepreneurs aren't always (or
perhaps even usually) the catalysts of that growth; a lot of it comes from
foreign investment, mega-conglomerates, etc. Most of the drop in poverty in
Eastern Asia in recent decades has not come from small business owners.

~~~
pretoriusB
> _No, mostly not. At least not without help from regional oligarchs or
> colonialists._

Those two types tend to be at best relationships with new "enterpreneurs" in
the areas.

> _There's very little utility to the west in most of Africa being poor. Like,
> most of sub-saharan Africa isn't especially resource rich, their food
> production isn't very efficient so we don't source much of that, nor do we
> outsource much labor there._

Well, I wouldn't be so sure.

See Shell and Nigeria, Congo and blood diamonds, C.A.R, etc. Things like this:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-
france...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-frances-
secret-war-396062.html)

And the West might not get much utility of some particular African states
being poor, but it gets much utility of them not being richer and stronger: it
gets to keep the nearby states at the status quo it wants. A stronger sub-
saharan state might alter the power status in the region for states the west
_does_ get utility from. It's for that very reason that the West would never
allow some "pan-african" federation to operate freely.

------
batgaijin
I hate the Gates foundation.

You know what would help those kids a lot more than your medicine? Copies of
all existing textbooks in an electronic format and access to all of our
patents.

When the polio vaccine was created the inventor refused to get a patent for
it, saying no one has the right to own it just like no one has the right to
own the sun.

I just find it very hard to support the Gates foundation when I believe that
it is playing by the rules to make the founders look and feel good instead of
actually challenging laws and cultural assumptions, which it truly should.

~~~
andreasvc
Why would you hate the Gates foundation for the state of affairs concerning
intellectual property? There's a democratic process to change those laws, that
change doesn't have to come from their foundation. I don't believe that
dumping a load of textbooks and lifting some patents would do much in itself,
that's just one of the barriers that's keeping the poor poor.

------
pserwylo
I agree with the sentiment about all lives being equal.

That is why I enjoyed challenging myself to think about it purely from an
economic perspective one day. We were on the plane, and the guy next to us was
studying "humanitarian economics". It is somewhat related to the issues that
the gates foundation has to think about when distributing their funds.

There was some curious dilemmas you need to face, and most of them seem to be
faced by removing yourself somewhat from the moral aspect, and thinking purely
about assigning a monetary value to them. The bit that I remember was thinking
about the financial value of a human life, as determined by its remaining
potential. What this means is [0]:

\- Small babies: haven't invested much time and effort into developing them,
so they are not worth as much.

\- Teenagers: Have spent considerable amount of time getting them ready to
contribute to society.

\- Older people: Although there has been a lot of effort invested in them, and
they have contributed a lot to society, there is only so much more "potential"
left.

Another interesting thing about this approach, is that in a funny way, it
mimics the sentiment of Belinda's statement of all lives being equal. This is
because (equally aged) people from Africa and Australia have the same monetary
value according to this.

[0] - Please don't hate me! I' actually quite a nice person, I just found this
interesting :) It's not how I normally think about people.

~~~
confluence
Actuaries need to do the same things all the time e.g. - probabilistic value
of remaining life for life insurance settlement/pricing.

Yes it feels weird to discuss these things - but it doesn't make you an evil
person or anything - life insurance must be priced, taxes distributed and
money donated.

The problem with "hands up in the air - everything is precious!" thinking is
that you can't make any decisions. If you assume that - all your money should
be flooding Africa.

You'll notice that this isn't the case.

You'll also notice that people only pay lip service to their morals - but they
never back it up with cash - and that's where actuaries and economists come
in.

------
pingou
I think the idea that all lives have equal values, while it sounds good, is
paradoxical. If a life has a potential to save plenty of other lives (for
example : healthcare worker, great scientist on the verge of discovering a new
cure, engineer working on a more efficient way to get drinking water), doesn't
that mean that their lives are worth more ? On the other hand I can't help
myself thinking that a surgeon isn't worth more than an unemployed guy who
does nothing except watching TV (for example), moral isn't always about logic.

------
confluence
All lives don't have equal current value, but the do have equal eventual value
- I'll explain that in a moment (please note: I mean financial/economic value
as I believe the term "moral/intrinsic" value to be so vague and undefined as
to be completely useless as a thought model or reasoning tool - I understand
what Melinda means).

This is empirically correct - a poor person in Africa is worth less than a
rich American - by definition of earning capacity, consuming capacity, life
expectancy and investment in their quality of life.

 _Please note: This does not mean the American is better than the African -
it's merely an accident of birth._

Now here's the point I'm going to make.

Keeping people alive has exponential value - irrelevant of current value (e.g.
African vs. American). What is the cost of keeping a poor African alive? I'm
going to say for ~90% of the population it'll be around $1-4K a year. Now this
is relatively expensive - however you must remember, this African will go on
to consume and work all their lives, have kids who themselves will have kids
and so forth - a combinatorial explosion of development and production making
us all the richer.

Think of it like this: We are all descendant from a group of ~2000 people from
Central Africa ~250,000 years ago. They produced ~7 billion people over the
course of a few hundred thousand years - that's some seriously insane value
generation right there. Imagine if we did the same with the ~7 billion we have
now - we could be the ~2000 of the next millennium.

Each life you save today means hundreds or even thousands in the future - it's
like an exponential investment. This is why we should protect poor people -
apart from fuzzy moralistic reasons. It is a financially sound investment.

Each poor person will be an eventual consumer and producer - we must maximise
their ability to do so - and that is why we must fundamentally help them. It
also feels good.

This is what I find so toxic about the entire Republican/private health care
in America debate. You invest millions over the course of people's lives to
keep them alive (schools/roads/bridges/cheap loans/national security/etc.) and
all of a sudden, if they get sick, you're happy that they metaphorically shoot
themselves in the head because of their sickness (bankruptcy/can't afford/die
etc.). Hence, you must also be happy when this kills the ability of their
families to consume, produce and reproduce by an order of magnitude for the
foreseeable future. We must keep people alive not merely because it's a good
investment in aggregate, and not merely because it is the correct thing to do,
but also because it's financially nonsensical to do otherwise - especially in
a first world country. People are expensive, they take huge amounts of
resources to bring up, and they have a high ROI - we should protect these
investments for the sake of protecting our collective future.

Secondly, pushing birth control doesn't do jack to population growth. The vast
majority of variance in development/population rates between countries is
explained by GDP per capita. Or as Karan Singh, a former minister of
population in India once stated:

 _> Development is the best contraceptive._

\-- Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox>

Disclaimer:

Just to reiterate - I am not saying that one human is better than another in
any sense of fundamental long-term value. I merely state that current value of
any one human is grossly unequal due to path-dependent birth (born in America
vs. Afghanistan) - however I mean to strongly imprint upon you that that the
current value of a human doesn't matter in the long term - because humans in
aggregate are worth the same over many generations because:

> _In the long run we are all dead._

\-- John Maynard Keynes

What matters is how we ensure the survival of a vibrant next generation,
regardless of race, creed or birth.

~~~
kaptain
Melinda Gates wasn't talking about economic value. I find it difficult to
believe that most HN'rs take her statement to mean economic value since, as
most people have been pointing out, all lives don't have equivalent financial
worth.

The rest of your point, I think, is a very interesting way to look at the
value of human life, but it is a crude way of evaluating the worth of humanity
purely in the context of financial value.

At the risk of getting touch-feely amongst an audience that is very rational
and analytical, there is something sacred and indescribable of all life (not
just human) simply because it's not something that we can create from
artificial means. This fact, I think, is what makes it hard to say one life is
more valuable than another (again, just to be clear, I'm using 'value' as in
financial value).

~~~
mikedmiked
(justification to read my post here: at the end I argue richer people have
higher moral value!)

Many of us think its 'brave' and 'correct' to say "all lives are equal value"
in the moral sense. Its a 'sexy' thought to have as it seems liberal and its
simple, but it is ultimately wrong.

Our actions are what define us, so a person who performs good/selfless actions
that benefit others should be defined as higher value than a selfish
murderer/rapist.

If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as
bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that
way.

Your value (in the moral sense) should simply be a function how much good you
provide to the world. This leads to the difficult issue where because we can
in fact buy "good" (by buying anti-malaria nets for children for £5 a pop) you
find that those born into wealth have a higher capacity to perform "good" and
therefore, on average, have a higher moral value by this definition.

~~~
digeridoo
> If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally
> as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think
> that way.

?

So is murder of an 80-year old worse, or murder of a child? I'm confused,
because I don't really think that way.

I'm also not buying into this self-obsessed view of "value". Americans and
Europeans do more damage to the world per capita than anyone else in terms of
of energy consumption, pollution, and creating economic inequality. Their
charitability does not really make up for it.

For me the only distinction is that I value people I know more than people I
don't know. However, everyone is someone I could get to know.

------
stuaxo
Wow, and a crazy trolling biblical comment on it already, saying that people
in the third world must deserve what they get because their idle ... amazing.

------
jobigoud
At first I thought this would be a case for veganism.

------
Jach
<http://hardtruthsfromsoftcats.tumblr.com/post/35274152116> (Same amount of
justification as Melinda gave. To the point of traveling to open one's eyes, I
have a friend who gave up on the African continent entirely after learning
more about its countries.)

------
jl6
There is no such thing as intrinsic value, whether economic value or moral
value, whether of goods or of people. Value is subjectively assigned by
people, according to the push and pull of their own internal motivations.

So it is meaningless to talk about value without asking: valued by who?

Some people (say, my family) are hugely more "valuable" to me than others.

------
scotty79
I'd rather say:

    
    
      Life l1, l2; # initialises by default to unique value
      l1 > l2;     # false
      l1 < l2;     # false
      l1 == l2;    # false
    

Calling lives equal means that any life is replaceble by any other and you can
allow for someone to die to save someone else without any trouble.

~~~
alexanderh
Agreed. Saying everyone is equal is a nice elementary school thought, meant to
inspire people. But it simply isn't factually true.

We're so far disconnected from the tribal traditions of our distant ancestors,
we forget that different values can be very easily bestowed upon an
individuals life, for very legitimate reasons in some cases (when its life or
death... and survival of the fittest, in an ancient society). I guess I can
sort of see some truth in "we all have equal potential" but even thats shaky
concept at best, just meant to inspire people.

Thats all this speech appears to be though, an inspirational talk. Not
something thats going to stand to the logical rigor most HN readers are going
to want to apply to it.

------
johncoltrane
All lives _should_ have equal value, maybe.

------
berito
No lives have different values. Bin Laden != Paul Graham

------
jonah
Except that she's in favor of population control...

~~~
adaml_623
You are misquoting her. She is in favour of contraception. That gives a woman
control over whether her body will become pregnant.

I think you should elaborate. Your view is not very clear.

~~~
jonah
Not really. Birth control reduces the number of people born.

I'm not saying anything about motives or whether it's the right thing to do or
not, rather simply pointing it out.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-
development/2012/jul/11/ric...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-
development/2012/jul/11/rich-countries-pledge-family-planning-women)

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/Search.aspx?meta=MDCont...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/Search.aspx?meta=MDContentType%3aGrant%3bMDTopic%3aFamily+Planning)

~~~
adaml_623
Slightly deeper philosophical point I think you're getting at there but I
think reducing the number of people born is not equivalent to not valuing a
life.

------
meaty
Until a profit is to be made...

Yes that's a jab at capitalism and commercial healthcare.

~~~
GuiA
I believe she meant it in a moral sense, rather than as a truth upheld by our
current societal system (because it isn't)

