[dos1]

I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. Sure, they may not be the problems that you think are most important, and I'm sure the foundation is making missteps along the way and wasting some money. But his message in this article is a good one I think:

> The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach

This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.

[natural219]

I am beyond disgusted with every negative poster in this thread. I have never met or heard of anybody so horrible, awful, and heartless that they would condemn one of the wealthiest people in the world for giving away his entire fortune and retirement to try and save the lives of millions of people.

I want to apologize for these next two words. It's completely out of character for me, and they might get me banned from Hacker News, and that's fine with me. If you are reading this, and you are one of the aforementioned negative posters, I have only two words for you, and I say them from the deepest part of my heart:

edit: redacted. Moment of rage. You can guess what the words are.

[rjzzleep]

well, you know, i could say yes you're right. (personally i don't think bill gates is a bad guy).

but you kinda described the problem in your very post. that's quite a common problem(in the states arguable more than elsewhere) in attitude. throwing unlimited amounts of money at things, and hoping they will magically resolve themselves is not really very smart imho.

but then again, i would argue he's old, and he's tired, and his own company has turned in this mixture of xerox parc on the one hand, and a massive goliath that moves so slow you barely even notice it on the other, that he feels with some luck the money might just end up in the right guys hands. in a way that's very close to vc thinking

[natural219]

Look, I'm not saying that anybody who engages in philanthropy is beyond criticism. We certainly need to be able to critically discuss these issues in order to provide the best help for those in need.

However, this should not mean that your criticism's of the Foundation's methods should reflect your opinion of Bill Gates The Man, or really provoke any kind of moral response other than "holy shit, this guy is a massive force for good in the world, and my entire life's work will amount to a hair compared to the work that Gates and the foundation has done."

Basically, if every comment here would have started with "Bravo and kudos to Mr. Gates and the foundation. I am concerned that some of their goals, however, are misguided...", then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Secondly -- unless you've worked extensively with the developing world, there's a very large chance that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to the Foundation's efforts or goals. Developmental economics, for some reason, tends to attract much more armchair philosophers than other professions, and it's much worse because these systems we're dealing with are off-scale in terms of complexity and uncertainty.

[gnarbarian]

I'll say them. I assume it was one of these three:

Fuck You!

Fuck off!

Eat Shit!

These four are from me though:

Fuck off and die.

[userulluipeste]

Mr. Steve Jobs was your role model, wasn't he?

[gnarbarian]

Not at all, I can't stand the guy. I'm more of a Carmack and Torvalds fan actually. But I really can't stand pussyfooting around and shielding people from negative perceptions. If something is bad they ought to know it and know why it is bad. One of the more valuable traits of a good professional is having the guts to say what needs to be said, albeit with quite a bit more tact than I demonstrated above and without resorting to insults of course. Truth to power and all that. Get it out in the open or it will fester quietly and blow up at the worst possible time. I think it's also very important not to take personal offence when someone disagrees with a design decision or says they don't like your implementation of something. Entirely too many people take engineering critiques personally and that simply should not happen. How many structural engineers would be butthurt if you showed them how to do something cheaper stronger and safer?

[javajosh]

> I don't get the negativity in this thread.

Bill Gates is bringing a lot of assumptions with him that tacitly validate the incumbent political, social, and economic regimes. I think a lot of us would prefer that Gates do something revolutionary with his money rather than something evolutionary.

First and foremost, the BMGF needs to consider overall-quality of life, not just specific, narrow measurements. It is only within this context that the big problems can be defined, and the correct measurements determined. It may very well be that improved infant mortality and education outcomes are not linked to overall improved quality of life. This might seem counter-intuitive, but it's easy to think of scenarios where this is the case.

Anecdotally, the thing that seems to improve people's quality of life is reducing the risk that they'll win the "you're life is ruined!" lottery. You can win this lottery in ways that are hard to prevent, like disease, accident, or natural disaster. You can win this lottery politically: surprise, the FBI, CIA, or Carmen Ortiz has decided to ruin your life.

Contrast this with what the BMGF is doing. They seem to be focusing on another goal, which is to give more people a life that can be ruined. E.g. a baby that lives is going to have a chance at life. A child who's educated is going to have a better chance at life. Noble indeed. But I have to wonder of that time and money would not be better spent helping those who manage to "naturally" obtain a life avoid winning the your life is now ruined lottery.

[adaml_623]

Are you disagreeing with all the studies that have observed that decreases in child mortality lead to a decrease in the birth rate.

So stopping polio not only saves those potential victims but actually encourages less children to be born.

This is something I thought was commonly accepted but maybe I'm wrong.

[javajosh]

I don't think I said anything close to that, actually. It may be that the BMGF is doing exactly the right thing to improve overall quality of life; but I would like them to be explicit that quality of life is more important than quantity. Saving a baby just so that it can starve to death later in life is not a good outcome.

[userulluipeste]

"It may very well be that improved infant mortality [...] are not linked to overall improved quality of life."

Are you serious? I read here that being alive isn't necessarily a premise to having an improved quality of life!

Edit (addition): I wish I could down-vote you for this kind of nonsense.

[LarrySDonald]

I think it's partly because so many of us grew up basically hating him for the software we had to work under (and before it's brought up, no, no gun to the head, but usually there were few options and for the most part you work with what the boss tells you to work with), rightly or wrongly.

It's also partly because there are some flaws in his methods here and there and it isn't perfect. That's more of a reason stemming from a complete disconnect from how charity projects usually work. It's very rare to see any metric, useful or otherwise, nor any consideration toward "Ok, so looking at the data, is there a better approach?". Most take a kind of "field of dreams" approach and at best confirm that they're doing more good than harm and leave it at that, rather than heavily crunch into how much good it's doing or isn't doing, how well it works compared to other approaches, what could be learned and applied to future efforts including area differences, and so forth. That's terrible - just because something is better than nothing is no excuse to not attempt to optimize it. Yet it never seems to happen outside of medicine (a field used to living and dying on it's data) and even then often taking a rather naive approach and considering improvements in cases rather than a more bulk-medicine approach similar to military medicine (people are dying constantly at a high rate, so the problem isn't so much how well an individual treatment works as how well a treatment, applied shotgun over a group, works considering it's cost).

[jneen]

The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.

[pg]

Precisely what do you mean it "ends up being really condescending?"

Let me tell you what I think you mean. I think you're attributing something happening inside your own head to the person you're reacting to. You're angry. The reason you're angry is that you have a bunch of arbitrary prejudices that have been set off by something you read. But you don't want to attribute your reaction to your own prejudices. So the only place left to attribute it to is the stimulus that made you angry.

[djt]

Its a tough problem to shake for a lot of people by the sounds of it.

He's donating $40 billion and more importantly his time, yet people are reacting so negatively.

What I find even harder to understand is that he is using the Scientific Method to do the greatest good for the time/dollars and people in a community that are all about measuring value are calling him prejudiced and making excuses to allow themselves to hate him for their own reasons.

[derefr]

It looks like there are three problems at work here:

1. A framing effect: the narrative of "poor, starving Africans" makes you sympathize with them, and thus consider them the "in-group" of the narrative.

2. A fairness/democratic bias: people think that the best way for a group to decide on something, is for everyone to have an equal vote. Even if half the people making up the group are experts and the other half have no idea what they're talking about; even if what they're "voting" on is a fact like "the distance between [two cities none of them have ever heard of]."

(Or, at least, on the face of it. People actually like being ruled by a high-status dictator as long as they have a way to pretend they're not being ruled--and thus aren't losing status from submission. This is why you'll get more enthusiasm for electing a leader than most forms of direct democracy--even when things like holding referendums are pretty easy to implement today.)

3. People believe that only their in-group holds the information necessary to make decisions about what their in-group should do. This one is actually not that far off; central allocation, as tried in Communism et al., failed due to many instances of the Principal-Agent problem: "orders from on high" to do things with neither clarity as to how accomplishing those things will benefit anyone, or an accompanying incentive structure to make those actually the things that will get done.

But this only holds for in-groups that are about the size of "tribe" in hunter-gatherer terms: 20-150 people--where the group can come to a single decided set of social mores pretty much by osmosis. When you get entire societies thinking this way, countries composed of millions of people where there's no single thing everyone can agree on, only laws that are barely tolerated--you begin to find that decisions derived from sociological statistics achieve better results than just asking the population what they want.

---

Combining these effects, we see a poor, sympathetic in-group being dominated by the will of a dictator, who must not know what the heck he's talking about, not being part of their group and all. It smells vaguely of colonialism [something most Americans are familiar with]: of being ruled over from the seat of power of a distant empire who has no "real" idea of what's important to your own people or what your own desires would be. And so, we don't like it.

Even though, in consequentialist terms, it's the best possible thing.

[danenania]

The argument may not have been stated as well as it could have, but your response reduces to emotional scapegoating what is really a valid concern.

Let's say that during America's period of slavery, there was an extremely wealthy northeastern industrialist who donated a large portion of his wealth to improve the living conditions of slaves. He wanted them to have better food, better clothes, better medical care, etc. But even though his wealth was gained by legitimate free enterprise and not slavery, he had never called for the outright abolition of slavery, just lamented the poor living conditions of the slaves.

The industrialist's contribution should certainly be applauded, as it would certainly do good, but without addressing the fundamental injustice, it only makes a system predicated on vast suffering slightly more tolerable.

In short, hoping for the winners of a corrupt system to save the losers is foolish. If we had real free markets and real democracy, it might be a different story, but we don't. Our situation cannot be remedied by charity, welfare, or incremental reforms. We need fundamental structural transformation of our political and economic institutions. Anything short, however noble the aim, is equivalent to trying to make slaves more comfortable without freeing them.

[bokonist]

In your analogy, what is the modern equivalent to slavery? What oppressive institution should Gates be trying to abolish?

[dmhdlr]

Not sure why you need a cognitive explanation for what, outside rightist establishments, is hardly a controversial sentiment.

Western countries telling the rest of the world what to do is not only condescending; it repackages old imperial propagandas of improvement, development, dependency, etc., and serves to further entrench Western power abroad.

[ajju]

>Western countries telling the rest of the world what to do is

Bill Gates is not a Western country. He is a really smart guy who has proved himself pretty good at solving big problems by spending his own money. [1]

If you read the article, he actually criticizes aid linked to furthering political interests. All he is saying is "Aid and development programmes should use feedback to improve things they do." I can't think of a good reason why any one on hacker news who would disagree with such a simple, logical argument.

Are we so blinded by misdeeds of Western nations in the past that we want a man who has experience running some of the largest scale aid operations in the world to shut up and not talk about what he has learned just because he is a citizen of America and he is white?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/01/12/bill-ga...

[dmhdlr]

>Bill Gates is not a Western country

Except that the Gates Foundation acts like one. Its endowment is larger than the GDP about half of the countries of the world. It exists to promote a "creative capitalism" in which the domain of public, governmental services is now understood to be yet another market open for business (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg/speeches/2008...).

[jneen]

I'm not sure how to respond to this - do you have anything to actually say about the topic at hand? Because all this comment does is attack me for having "arbitrary prejudices" and adds nothing to the discussion.

[anewguy99]

Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?

[illuminate]

Complicity is only with those willfully ignorant, I imagine. Colonialism ~is~ a malevolent mass. "Rich white persons" tend to be the force behind colonialism, but theoretically it could be anyone.

[JanezStupar]

What about Chinese colonialism?

[illuminate]

Certainly in effect.

[CamperBob2]

So I'm assuming you're of native ancestry in your particular region.

[dllthomas]

People can migrate without being colonists. Certainly a lot of historical migration was due to colonialism, but someone who moved to a developed country last year (from either a developed or undeveloped country) clearly isn't guilty of it.

Second, even if the parent commenter's ancestors were colonists of some stripe, people aren't bound in any way to say that the actions taken by their ancestors were the right ones.

[illuminate]

I'm not pretending to claim some sort of native ancestry, and being the result of colonialism doesn't preclude me from disapproving of policies and interests beyond my control.

[dmhdlr]

What rule is there against condemning your own ancestors?

[dmhdlr]

Rich whites were specified.

[9392732]

It still groups a large amount of people under one banner segmented with race as a variable.

Why can it not just be "rich people"?

[dllthomas]

No no, the point was that we're a differentiated malevolent mass.

[stcredzero]

Well, to be fair, I think the commenter meant partly malevolent and partly unintentionally harmful.

[lhnz]

I did not realise that rich people were all evil...

[9392732]

It was a racist comment

[sliverstorm]

especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.

Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then. Which is a fairer fight- bushmen vs. rich white guys, or rich white guy vs other rich white guys?

[illuminate]

"Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then"

This is not a binary "problems" or "no problems". The manner by which colonialists "improve" the rest of the world is at the expense of the rest of the world.

Not commenting on Gates' particular methods, but injecting money generally comes with a cost, and at various freedoms of the countries involved. At best of intention, throwing money at a problem is not usually solving the conditions behind a problem.

[dllthomas]

But measuring what you're doing and the impacts you're having and adjusting as you go is likely to have a better outcome than those with similar goals who lacked such introspection.

[illuminate]

I don't disagree with this at all.

[mc32]

Doers it matter who is solving problems, so long as problems are getting solved?

In a few years it will be billionaire Chinese who are solving big problems. What will be the negative attribute for that? Lots of people from all places around the world are solving problems for all of us. If Muhammad Yunus had not been local to Bangladesh, would he be some kind of villain? Is it bad that he's male? Would it have been better had he been a woman (most microloans are lend to women, since they appear more dependable and have greater need)?

[TDL]

So you would rather have him do nothing?

[specialist]

Sometimes "free" is too expensive.

Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.

Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.

[dllthomas]

My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.

[rdwallis]

I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling.

Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?

[TDL]

I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.

[technoslut]

>I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining.

I respect Bill Gates and think his cause is noble but they are partly childish because of the idealism and the hopes to cure disease. ilaksh's post on this thread is part of the reason why though I wanted to reply to your post instead of doing so to his. It will be far more controversial though.

David Attenborough recently said that human beings are a plague on Earth.

I'll present you with three stories:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906520/planet-earth-narra...

Peter Beard, in an interview with Alec Baldwin on 'Here's the Thing', said that AIDS was a good thing in Africa because of overpopulation and it caused quite a stir.

I listened to an All Things Considered story where, not only was there a slaughter of elephants for their ivory tusks, but they would wait until more elephants would come back to mourn the slain and the poachers would kill them too. When asked, off the record, the poacher said he had to feed his family. The natural question I asked is "Why are you having kids you can't afford?" The question wasn't asked during the piece and it's something that isn't asked worldwide.

There are numerous examples of mankind ruining the environment. As the most intelligent life on this planet, we are to be the custodians and not expand like a virus.

Even if you took the approach of mankind over everything else we are now destroying the soil which we rely on and food shortages continue as the price for food continues to rise.

The answers don't come easy in this world. The best ones are the most difficult to make. I suspect Western countries will have to do the same in the coming years to limit population growth.

[MichaelGG]

Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans? We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA. I'm not sure how you can state that we now must be custodians and not expand more.

I know you "can't get an ought from an is", and I can come up with several utility functions that have the effect of limiting humankind's impact, but I'm not sure there's any fundamental reason they're valid. You may want to save the environment so you can continue to live, but poaching elephants doesn't harm human survivability.

[DanBC]

We need Earth until we can survive without it. We're a long way from that point.

[technoslut]

>Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans?

If you'd like to be arrogant about it then that's fine. However, we revolve around and are dependent on animals, insects and plants to provide us life.

>We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA.

You can expand as much as you want. Nature will fight back like it has with adaptive viruses and the Ice Age.

>You may want to save the environment so you can continue to live, but poaching elephants doesn't harm human survivability.

My comment dealt with saving humanity from humans. If you think it's fine to kill elephants while they hold a funeral then you've lost your humanity. Some already have. A bunch of 6 year-olds just got killed and NRA subscriptions went up during that span before any legislation.

[MichaelGG]

>You can expand as much as you want. Nature will fight back like it has with adaptive viruses and the Ice Age.

Ice Age? Can you point me to the theory that shows how Earth or "Nature" is somehow an entity that performs massive climate shifts in response to too-successful lifeforms?

There is no necessary balance in nature. It's a constant struggle and what you see just might be a somewhat stable state. If an actor in that system (like humans) finds a game-theoretic superior strategy, there's no fundamental reason why they won't "win" and destroy the rest of the ecosystem and go extinct. Plenty of other species go extinct all the time. That's nature.

Anyways, I'm not saying it's fine to kill elephants at all. Indeed, I find it disgusting, and it'd be fantastic if societies could figure out ways to ensure that poaching isn't a beneficial action. But I am pointing out there's no mandatory acceptance of any axioms that would generate an obligation to "take care of the Earth", whatever that means. And there's definitely no particular reason why a human killing elephants to feed his family is somehow invalid, whereas if lions do the same thing, it's OK.

[technoslut]

>Ice Age? Can you point me to the theory that shows how Earth or "Nature" is somehow an entity that performs massive climate shifts in response to too-successful lifeforms?

I can point to scientific theses about how it will occur in the future. Are you willing to bet against 95% of the scientific community?

>why a human killing elephants to feed his family is somehow invalid, whereas if lions do the same thing, it's OK.

Are lions wiping out a species?

[notahacker]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that criticisms of attempts to eradicate disease and suggestions that AIDs is a good thing because a tiny fraction of Africans participate in the ivory trade shows a lot more inhumanity than participating in the ivory trade (to feed ones family) itself.

[mathgladiator]

> However, we revolve around and are dependent on animals, insects and plants to provide us life.

That's because we are predators. There's no shame here; it's a simple truth.

> Nature will fight back

The way you put it sounds like nature is a person. Instead, nature is a set of rules that we don't fully understand yet. One day, we may understand those rules and control nature. OR, our bets fail and we are dead.

[jacoblyles]

In the 1500s we invented Humanism.

Now, finally, in this post-modern world we have invented Anti-Humanism. This allows truly clever humans to signal how truly clever they are. Because it takes a truly clever human to recognize the value of Anti-Humanism.

Simple folk still think humans are a good thing.

[derefr]

Simple folk also cause stock market bubbles. The point of "anti-humanism", as you term it, is not that there should be fewer humans forever--it's that there should be fewer simultaneously. Just like publicly-traded companies, people want to have more direct descendants--greater returns--today, even if it means their "company" (all descendants looking forward) will be worse off after another year/generation. Anti-humanism is basically a recommendation to maximize long-term, instead of short-term, gains: to have fewer children and provide each with more resources such that each child will be more likely to be able to have high-quality descendants of their own.

An interesting analogy can be drawn from dwarf wheat, the grain that allowed the agriculture industry to become exponentially more efficient and productive over the last several decades. Dwarf wheat is a "genetically modified" crop, but not in the way you would imagine; we didn't make it hardier, or higher-producing at its own expense, or anything else. All we did to get massive gains in wheat production, was to turn off the part of the wheat's genetic code that made each stalk of wheat attempt to grow taller than each other stalk of wheat, thus making every stalk expend the majority of its resources on (inedible) stalk, and relatively little on (both edible to us, and reproductively important to it) grain. Since all the wheat has the gene for competitive growth turned off, all the wheat ends up short--and so all the wheat stalks still end up getting just as much sunlight, but can use all the resources they would have put into growth upward to instead sprout hardier, more nutritious grain.

Humans--all animals [1]--have a competitive program of their own: absent certain status-signaling drives that arise in high-intelligence+education groups, each human attempts to have as many children as possible to ensure their line has as many opportunities as it can to be passed on. The length of our stalks is pretty ridiculous :)

[1] Okay, maybe not all animals. I'm sure some parthenogenetic lizard or other such beastie fails this test after careful thought.

[maxerickson]

Dwarf wheat handles fertilizer better (shorter, thicker stems can hold up a larger seed...):

http://books.google.com/books?id=22JBi4RC-HwC&lpg=PA55&#...

Any crop wheat has already been bamboozled into massively over-investing in each seed.

[jacoblyles]

The 1960s called. They want their failed Malthusian predictions back.

[derefr]

It seems odd to accuse someone of Malthusianism who specifically went out of their way to mention the mass-farming techniques that have stalled Malthusianism.

On the other hand, those farming techniques rely on heavy fertilizer loads--which then rely on either hydrocarbons (which we will run out of) or large masses of animal waste--which requires large numbers of animals--which requires feeding those large numbers of animals. And what do they eat? The majority of the mass-farmed crops. Just because it's stalled now, doesn't mean it's stalled forever. :)

[ctl]

So basically: overpopulation is bad, therefore human death is a good thing, therefore curing disease is bad.

This argument is simultaneously (1) viscerally horrifying and (2) completely wrong.

It is wrong because curing disease does not increase population growth rate. Birth rate is extremely well-correlated with infant mortality rate, and pretty well anticorrelated with both life expectancy and quality of life. That's why the countries with the highest population growth rates also have some of the highest mortality rates. If you want to stop overpopulation, you should target common causes of death, especially those that afflict young children.

Which is exactly what Bill Gates is doing.

[notJim]

There are a number of flawed assumptions here. The first one is that population growth is naturally unbounded, but that idea has been outdated for a long time. Population growth follows a logistic growth curve.

Another bad assumption you're making is that the West's population is growing rapidly, but it's not. In fact, populations in Western countries are barely growing, and often are only growing due to immigration, or due to higher birth rates among immigrant populations.

Finally, yet another bad assumption you're making is that we should limit population growth through draconian measures like… well murdering people, or allowing them to die unnecessarily. In fact, the best way to limit population growth is through education, better access to healthcare, and economic development. As people become more educated and financially successful, they naturally delay childbirth and have fewer children as a result. When people have access to health services like education, birth control and abortions, they can better make decisions about children.

You can google “overpopulation myth” or simply “overpopulation” to verify what I've written here.

[technoslut]

>There are a number of flawed assumptions here. The first one is that population growth is naturally unbounded, but that idea has been outdated for a long time. Population growth follows a logistic growth curve.

The curve is on an upward climb while available resources have been declining.

>Finally, yet another bad assumption you're making is that we should limit population growth through draconian measures like… well murdering people, or allowing them to die unnecessarily.

I never said murder anyone. Nature's been doing that for a very long time.

Ever been to Africa? Do you think that the tribes care about education.

If the world had enough jobs to support everyone, then Western countries would have low job rates. Maybe you should have read my replies to similar comments.

[corporalagumbo]

Man... Not trying to attack you, but I think you're in that terrible phase of life where you're a) educated enough to know a bit of history and a bit of social theory, and how to make nice sentences but b) not educated enough to have balanced, forgiving views about human society, so you just lapse into overwhelming, aggressive and largely-unfounded cynicism about everything. I feel for you. I've been through the same phase, and it sucks.

Keep reading though, and keep thinking. You'll get through it soon enough. In the meantime, try to find things worth appreciating. See the good in what people are doing. Go into a big box store, and instead of thinking "look at all this disgusting consumerism sucking up natural resources and destroying the world!" try thinking "wow, isn't it great we've managed to develop such efficient and powerful technologies that we can provide such a dizzying array of products for so cheap to so many people? And isn't it great that our society is so open and undiscriminating that we let anyone buy whatever they want, if they have the money?"

[SoftwareMaven]

The answer to that problem is education, not killing off an underclass. Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.

The thing is, it's impossible to gain an education when you are constantly starving or sick. Solve that problem and you move towards solving the next.

[technoslut]

It's not about killing an underclass. Human beings are selfish.

>Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.

You're citing statistics without understanding the reason why. Education means a higher household income which has become less so during the recent economic crisis. The traditional reasoning, while crude, of why poor people have more kids is because they have less money. What they can do is have more sex because they don't have the money to do anything else.

We are at the point now where college grads have a hard time finding a job. How is more college grads going to solve the problem?

The gap has been widening in the US between the rich and middle class ever since Reagan. The same is happening for other Western countries as well.

[erikpukinskis]

Education and income both seem to effect fertility independently. There is evidence that income correlates with higher fertility, even controlling for education: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/52/09/48/PDF/publi_p... and vice versa: http://csde.washington.edu/~scurran/files/readings/May12/Why...

That said, all of the science on the subject is measuring very specific things and should be interpreted narrowly. You can say income is broadly correlated with fertility, and rule out some specific measures of education as an explanation for that particular (small) piece of the variance pie, but you can't then just make up an explanation and pretend it's supported by science. Just-so stories like the one you're telling are at best food for thought, or fodder for future experimental hypotheses. There's no scientific basis that I know of for the kind of mechanism you're proposing. Though I'd be happy to see more studies on the subject.

[anu_gupta]

> What they can do is have more sex because they don't have the money to do anything else.

Not sure why you're trolling so hard, but that did make me laugh. Access to entertainment has killed sex!

[gyardley]

The Malthusian fear of overpopulation is unfounded. Most demographers expect the world population to peak between 2040 and 2050 and then begin declining.

This isn't a particularly new idea, although recently it's been popularized with articles like this:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/11/overcrowding-nah-the-wor...

We are doing just fine limiting population growth without any difficult choices, and so is the rest of the world. Even birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have been dropping like a stone.

[DLWormwood]

> The natural question I asked is "Why are you having kids you can't afford?" The question wasn't asked during the piece and it's something that isn't asked worldwide.

You are misusing the word “natural” there…

It could be from no access to contraception or abortion, either due to lack of wealth or social precepts? Social mores that disparage men who don’t have kids? Lack of biological and statistical understanding of how sex and procreation are related?

Even in the West, it was only until recently (the Enlightenment, maybe?) that the notion of “choosing to have children” even existed. It was either considered an uncontrollable instinct or something influenced by divine providence, with the actual question of sexual behavior being dodged outright.

[notahacker]

Having a family larger than you can consistently feed seems less crazy when you're in an environment where you'll be totally dependent on your surviving offspring in your old age, and you can reasonably expect some of your offspring not to outlive you.

[rooshdi]

While I agree there needs to be a responsible approach to population growth, there is research which indicates improved education results in reduced reproduction rates, increased economic growth, and better overall health. [1]

While you may view Bill's idealism and hopes as childish, the fact he's trying to optimize the measurement process of human progress shows an awareness and openness to adapt as the information changes. This is crucial to ensuring resources are continually distributed efficiently as our understanding evolves.

Are we humans selfish to some extent? Sure, but we're trying to live in an existence out to kill us. What can we do but fight?

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6042/587

[cadlin]

Why is it population that is the metric and not something else, e.g. energy use? The developed world may have lower population growth, but it uses much more energy and it makes as much sense to reduce that as the number of humans.

Westerners who think population growth are usually talking about people living in underdeveloped countries, and are doing so in a way that is both prejudiced and dehumanizing. To me it looks like nothing more than people with power and money advocating for blatant cruelty towards those without either.

[philwelch]

If you think we should do with fewer humans on this earth--you first.

[genwin]

It's predictable that you'd be downvoted by the hivemind. Overpopulation is still taboo to discuss, even though it's obviously the world biggest problem, and the root cause of a multitude of other big problems.

[dos1]

I agree with you to an extent. It's why I would choose different problems to solve than what Mr. Gates feels are important. However, I don't think the Gates Foundation and its efforts are in any way a net negative.

Perhaps the poacher from your story would not need to kill more elephants to feed his children if the general condition of his country were better, and the economy supported other endeavors more readily (and prosperously) than poaching. In fact, if you believe the Rand think-tank, "first world" inhabitants produce less offspring, and much of the developed world is facing a looming underpopulation crisis.

I know many Western European countries have a birthrate that is lower than the replacement rate. This may be the case for America as well, but last I heard our population was still rising, with immigration also being a contributing factor.

In any event, you're right in that the answers don't come easy. I think the fact that Mr. Gates is willing to make the attempt, and is showing some signs of success (whether it's the right success metric is certainly up for debate) is to be commended. More people should aspire to philanthropy and there are certainly worse role models than him.

[jhuni]

This negativity could be directed against the authoritarian attitude towards problem solving. If you have a problem with Microsoft Windows you have to ask the Microsoft authorities to solve it for you because they won't give you the source code so that you can handle the problem yourself. In a similar sense, Bill Gates isn't asking for the community to democratically decide where money could be best spent, he is spending money wherever he wants to solve problems he personally deems to be the most important.

[corporalagumbo]

It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Likewise, Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. If you didn't like Office, did you build a competitor program? No? Then don't complain.

Seriously, the freedom to enjoy success and the autonomy to use one's own money and run one's own business however one sees fit, within the limits of the law, are like the fundamental principles of capitalism and basically the key to all modern economic and technological progress...

[jhuni]

> It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users.

Microsoft Office is only "his" product because Microsoft is holding its source code in secret rather then releasing it to the benefit of the entire world. Since Bill Gates' entire career is based upon secrecy rather then productivity his ownership of billions of dollars is illegitimate.

> the key to all modern economic and technological progress

The main thing holding back technological progress today is secrecy. When corporations develop products in secret this leads to wasteful overlap. We should be using the Internet to facilitate global cooperation on technological projects.

[stcredzero]

> The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach

This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me.

Sounds like a good outline for startups.

[megablast]

I am pretty sure this is the standard approach for doing almost anything int the business world.

[spigoteater]

> I don't get the negativity in this thread.

I don't want Bill Gates to do the world what he did to computing and commerce.

Plus, beware of the publicly-stated do-gooder. They're dangerous people.

[Alex3917]

"Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining."

If you actually look at KIPP (the main education reform that Bill Gates advocates), it seems more like an effort to basically enslave low-income minorities rather than a real attempt to improve education. I think there is actually pretty good reason to complain about this.

[Permit]

>If you actually look at KIPP (the main education reform that Bill Gates advocates), it seems more like an effort to basically enslave low-income minorities rather than a real attempt to improve education. I think there is actually pretty good reason to complain about this.

Yes, enslavement of low-income minorities, that's exactly what he's going for. This is ridiculous hyperbole.

[kenjackson]

Huh? I've heard complaints about KIPP, but never anything about any sort of metaphorical enslavement. Could you expand?

[Alex3917]

One of the main components of the program is extending both the school day and the school year, so that schooling is 10 hours a day and 11 months a year or whatever. Why? The logic is basically that low-income minorities can't be trusted to raise their own children, so the government needs to step in and separate them from their kids.

Paul Tough (the NYT's main KIPP advocate) has an article here explaining it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?_r=0

The basic idea is summed up in this quote from the article: "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" In other words, kids need to be in school 24/7 in order to "change their culture."

There a variety of problems with this, e.g.

- Not supported by data.

- Not being allowed to do stuff on your own prevents you from developing executive function.

- The program revolves entirely around extrinsic motivation, which will prevent most of these kids from actually maturing into adults and being able to handle anything beyond minimum wage jobs.

- Even if these kids do have improved reading and math scores on standardized tests, which there is not yet data to support, it's nowhere near clear that this would outweigh the other problems with the program.

KIPP makes a lot of sense if your goal is to take kids who would normally join gangs and give them enough skills to work at McDonald's, but as a compulsory government program (where you go to prison and literally become a slave if you don't participate) I think this is highly dubious.

[kenjackson]

There is data to support this. There's a well known phenomena called summer learning loss. Some of the research suggests that the majority of the gap between rich and poor students can be explained by summer learning loss.

And remember, parents have to enroll their children in KIPP. How is that any different than rich parents sending their children to afterschool and summer programs that are commonplace? In many ways their completely identical. Except that historically poor students haven't even had the option of good afterschool and summer program.

This is a voluntary program. If you think your child will thrive outside the program then don't send them there. Analogies to enslavement don't help. And saying that a parent who sends their child to KIPP is somehow denying their child some culture, yet not calling out middle-class/upper-class children who enjoy these benefits today, seems hypocritical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_learning_loss#Vulnerable...

[Alex3917]

I understand summer learning loss, but that doesn't mean that KIPP is actually the best model (or even beneficial) in practice, especially at scale. Also, summer learning loss only measures math and reading performance on standardized tests, not executive function, intrinsic motivation, etc. And even on those measures, the difference isn't especially huge in math, so we're really only talking about reading ability. (Neither high-SES nor low-SES are doing math problems over the summer.) Is year round schooling really the best way to close the literacy gap?

Also, KIPP is voluntary now, but my understanding is that Gates is trying to make it the standard model of schooling. I have less of an issue with parents sending their kids to the program voluntarily, though I still think it's a bad idea.

[Permit]

> Is year round schooling really the best way to close the literacy gap?

What's the alternative in your mind? Personally, it makes complete sense to me to have year-round schooling. Especially considering the effects its been shown to have on math and reading performance.

What's so bad about extra schooling?

Edit: Also, perhaps it was different for you as a child, but most children are not intrinsically motivated to participate in school as it stands. As a kid I was far more interested in playing Age of Empires or playing outside, so the argument that extrinsic motivation doesn't work seems weak to me.

[hackinthebochs]

>The logic is basically that low-income minorities can't be trusted to raise their own children, so the government needs to step in and separate them from their kids

In general this is true. There is a serious culture change that needs to happen and the parents aren't doing it. This is coming from a black man that has seen first hand the toxic culture a lot of these kids grow up in.

>The program revolves entirely around extrinsic motivation, which will prevent most of these kids from actually maturing into adults and being able to handle anything beyond minimum wage jobs.

I see some version of this argument trotted out all the time, and frankly its nonsense. The majority of kids, rich poor black white, do not have the motivation to learn or try hard at school on their own. It is only through extrinsic motivations that these kids are able to succeed: parents, peers, culture. This is precisely exactly what poor inner-city kids lack. Any program that aims to change the trajectory of black achievement must address these issues head-on. There is absolutely no place for political correctness in these discussions; this is entire generations of kids being lost to low achievement and poor future prospects.

[Alex3917]

"There is a serious culture change that needs to happen and the parents aren't doing it."

During the 1950s, basically the height of segregation, blacks were doing just fine. If it's an exaggeration to say that the black community was on track to be what the Jewish community is in society today, it certainly isn't by much.

Considering that much of the decline in the black community has been caused by the school system (as well as the war on drugs and a few other factors), I think it's rather optimistic to think that radically increasing the amount of schooling is going to fix things.

[corporalagumbo]

Blacks were doing just fine

Citation?

[corporalagumbo]

Maybe it would surprise you to realise that yes, child-rearing culture can be and is a cause of persistent poor educational outcomes and a large part of the poverty cycle. Watch "Precious" for a taste. Some poor parents are actually scared of and distrustful of education. Some feel jealous if they see their children succeeding.

Re: McDonalds, what's wrong with that? It's not glamorous but it's a solid job which teaches good skills. People need to start somewhere, people from poverty may have no experience with the very most basic financial and life-skills you take for granted: managing expenditure, keeping income regular, putting aside spare cash, staying in one job. Those are the basics people need to learn, and the idea is that someone from poverty who succeeds at that stage can pass on the benefits they gain to their children, who will do even better. Then in a generation or two more they can become a university-educated family.

[Alex3917]

"Maybe it would surprise you to realise that yes, child-rearing culture can be and is a cause of persistent poor educational outcomes and a large part of the poverty cycle."

I realize this. I don't think having kids in school for more hours per day is the right way to change the culture though.