
Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective - mike2477
http://www.insatiablefox.com/blog/2016/4/21/the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-is-really-big
======
dharmon
If you put aside the "M$ was evil and he is just atoning" arguments, Gates is
a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he's
passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe
inspiring.

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the
90's. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee's knees, I wanted to
be as effective as Gates.

~~~
amelius
Also worth mentioning is that, over the years, Microsoft has published an
impressive amount of research, whereas (e.g.) Apple has always been
disappointingly closed.

~~~
ignoramous
I think Apple revolutionized HCI with the Mac and then with the iPod and now
with iOS. They continue to push the bar in industrial design. They're
contributing in different ways. I'd not belittle their achievements. Design
principles that Apple has long been following are the norm today. Every tech
company has done their part. I don't like this constant bickering, I wish
people were more accepting and just saw the positive side of things more
often.

------
muntac
The size of the Gates Foundation is only impressive if you believe public
policy should be disproportionately influenced by the whims of a few rich
individuals. Philanthropists may not be motivated by profit like lobbyists,
but that doesn't mean they understand the needs of the people any better. For
issues related to relatively concrete sciences like medicine this matters
less. But in areas such as education for example, the role of the Gates
foundation has been disastrous.

[https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates-
foundation...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates-foundation-
reflects-the-good-and-the-bad-of-hacker-philanthropy/)

~~~
solipsism
Disastrous? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? Reading the article, perhaps
"ineffective" could be argued. Maybe their support of Common Core and such did
more harm than good, but they've pivoted based on evidence.

They're trying their best to do good with their money. This is more than can
be said for most billionaires. Are you suggesting it would be better if all
billionaires simply kept their money in the family and didn't try to help
others?

Any bold investment carries a risk of failure. Does that mean no one should
make bold investments, to you?

~~~
mike2477
Amen.

------
WalterBright
Bill Gates was a tough competitor, to be sure, and you had to bring your A
game when dealing with Microsoft. But the complaints that he was 'evil', when
you drill down to see what the actual complaint is, just seem to fade away.
Most of it seems to be simply envy.

See "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman.

P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against
Microsoft in programming languages.

~~~
ploxiln
Sure, it was just smart business plays in the tech industry, not really "evil"
like physically harming people or stealing stuff from them.

But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was
very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They
made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their
dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in
their day.

Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were
arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent
connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary
patches.

And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we
named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip
it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them
in xml tags!"

Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if
linux worked great with it: [http://edge-
op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...](http://edge-
op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf)

So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything
like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They
were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And
these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to.
But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely
justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way
to make my life worse, over and over again.

~~~
Nutmog
You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse,
much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward
compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the
clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own
platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the
most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for
some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility
problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could
very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers
because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware
they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today
with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two
different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a
similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that
makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them
successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple
too.

~~~
WalterBright
I bought an early Amiga in order to port the compiler to it. It irritated me
that they used standard connectors, but changed one pin in order to force
people to buy peripherals from them. I thought that strategy would doom Amiga,
and decided not to expend my dev time on it.

DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring
special floppy disks), with the same results.

------
mike2477
Hey there, data geeks!

I am doing research on the rise of social entrepreneurship and got sidetracked
by what a badass Bill Gates is. I found out that his foundation is 4x larger
than the next largest private foundation in the US. And if you add up the
wealth pledged as a part of The Giving Pledge it is 10x larger than that.

I compiled The Giving Pledge data on my own by researching net worths of each
pledgee. Planning to put the data on the Wikipedia page shortly.

I found the other data from the following sources (see direct links in
article):

Foundation Center The Giving Pledge NP Trust GBD Compare AVAC

Happy to answer any questions and would love feedback.

~~~
vezycash
How about a comparison with historical philanthropists like Rockefeller and
Andrew Carnegie in constant currency?

~~~
eru
Or as ratio of nominal GDP at the time.

------
lazaroclapp
I was surprised to not find a comparison between those private charitable
contributions and the money spent by nations all over the world on similar
programs. Unless I am missing something, it would look to me like the Giving
Pledge, all together, spent more money on the fight against AIDS in the last
10 years than the U.S. government did [0]. If that is true, then there are
still the questions left of who spent money more efficiently, whether and
which other uses of taxes are more important than the fight against AIDS, as
well as the general philosophical question of whether we should allow a few
individuals to control how a huge proportion of the resources of the world are
used, and under which circumstances. But beyond all those delta-from-the-
ideal-world questions, it is indeed a pretty huge amount of good likely being
done there.

[0] [http://kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/u-s-
federal-f...](http://kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/u-s-federal-
funding-for-hivaids-the-presidents-fy-2016-budget-request/)

------
swampthinker
Website needs some work for mobile view:

[http://i.imgur.com/vlwi2hh.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/vlwi2hh.jpg)

~~~
nathancahill
Yes, and the Subscribe popup breaks it on mobile.

------
octref
More and more I feel the best data visualization for most scenario is just
bar, line, and pie charts. They need no explanation and communicate
information effectively.

Too many visualizations that are fun and fancy but convey ideas poorly.

~~~
csours
Pie Charts are the Worst [1]. In this context, a single pie chart is OK. I
agree bar and line charts should usually be sufficient.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-
worst-2013...](http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6)

~~~
eru
Scatter plots can be decent, too.

------
zurn
I was expecting to see a comparison to public sector development programs in
countries with bigger government.

For example USA does only 0.22% of GNI in foreign aid compared to the 0.7%
target and 0.3-0.5% realized in its cohort of industrialized countries.
([http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm](http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm))

------
sametmax
Don't you find very suspicous that since the past year, we get regularly those
stories comming up in reddit, imgur, hacker news, etc ?

Think about it: there are a ton of nice people doing nice things around. Even
tech people. But you hear only about Bill.

The Gate Foundation existed for a long time. It actually paid my bills 7 years
ago (wasting half of the money before reaching me, BTW), and we didn't have
this incredible "yeah, best man ever" crazy minset going around.

It smells a lot like well done PR, with a lot of money behind to give a better
image of the man, targetting social networks by subtils channels.

And if you need PR and pays to much for it, you probably DON'T deserve the
praises.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before
> reaching me, BTW)_

Maybe you should have taken the moral high ground and _declined the money_ ,
rather than taking it, criticizing how much was "wasted", then bad-mouthing it
on a public forum.

Talk about a sense of entitlement.

~~~
sametmax
Yes, I made a bad decision. I don't pretend to be a wonderful person. However,
I can see people are trying very hard to make sure people think Gate is. And
he is not.

------
mcguire
I was just pondering Gate's legacy the other day. While I was blowing away
another copy of Windows that I paid for but never booted.

------
k_lander
i'm curious as to whether it is more effective for an individual to hold a
contribute-as-you go style to philantrophy vs a make-money-first-then-donate
strategy like gates did. Given that most people aren't going to be
billionaires, I would guess the former but maybe someone who has looked at the
data can provide some insight.

~~~
TheLogothete
Donating money if you are not (filthy) rich is foolish. Those money would be
MUCH better spent on you. If you want to help, do it with personal efforts.

~~~
eru
What makes you think so?

~~~
TheLogothete
Because your money would not be spent efficiently.

~~~
eru
I don't get it. If you are looking for pure efficiency, most people on here
are much better working in IT and giving money to efficient charities.

If by personal efforts you mean helping out in a soup kitchen or flying to
Detroit to help struggling kids---that's pretty inefficient.

Or did you mean something else?

------
throwaway_xx9
Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ...

1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money
in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits.

2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services
like education and healthcare. In the USA, they're not - the capital gains
rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century.

3) Foundations work very well for tax planning. Who knows what their
efficiency is as charity?

~~~
geomark
People fail to understand the difference between innovation driven monopoly
and government enforced monopoly.

The former is commendable, indicating that a company has developed a product
so useful that it becomes so widely adopted as to become a monopoly. Nobody is
forced to buy the product - people just find it so useful that the it
dominates in the marketplace. And there is nothing preventing the rise of a
competitor other than the monopolist's success. Got enough smarts and money to
beat them? Then go for it.

That's quite different than when a company uses regulatory capture to get
regulations passed that maintain their monopoly and block competitors.

~~~
eggy
I understand that, and I like the label of Corporatism when it is a big
company colluding with the state, as opposed to Capitalism, which is for all
its good and bad, better than the alternatives right now.

~~~
geomark
Yeah, I guess those are pretty good labels. I looked for a succinct definition
of Corporatism: "the control of a state or organization by large interest
groups." That happens in every economic system, not just capitalism.

------
known
I'd request Gates to contribute to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals)

~~~
williadc
They're on it.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-
Center/Speeches/2013/03...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-
Center/Speeches/2013/03/High-Level-Dialogue-on-Health-in-the-
Post-2015-Development-Agenda)

