Neither. Foundations are potentially good for education, and advocacy/lobbying is absolutely necessary. The Gates Foundation specifically is bad though because:
A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve.
B) For whatever issue he's trying to solve, he buys every organization that might conceivable oppose him, creating a one-truth world.
For what it's worth, there are prominent people who accuse him of doing the same thing with respect to malaria. To quote Ravitch again:
"The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientists in the field were 'locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,' making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making proces, he charged, was 'a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself.' In a statement that had implications for the foundation's education initiatives, the scientist said that the powerful influence of the foundation 'could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.' In other worlds, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views."
> A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve.
I'm not surprised, but really this is inherent in the philanthropy-based model of societal improvement. Rich people, who are (barring huge inheritance) by definition successful in at least one domain, have a large pressure to prove their general greatness by succeeding in another one, once they turn to charity. But this does not really lend itself to familiarization or deep interest. Rather, the point is to try to get some metrics up and running as fast as possible and demonstrate results— a recipe for failure, of course.
If rich people were immensely smarter than the general public, in a way that also generalized across domains, then it'd maybe work well, and not even need metrics. But they are usually not. Most rich people are of somewhere around average intelligence. Gates had some lucky breaks around being in the right place at the right time, with a lucky choice in parents, so got (much) more money than the average person. But this did not somehow give him vast insight into all problems in all other fields of human endeavor. He does not have any better insight into education than anyone else. But the problem is, he has to pretend that he does. He has to throw his money into trying to prove this falsehood true.
Albert Einstein, who was undeniably gifted in some fields of human endeavor, recognized this, which is why he was in favor of a strongly democratic approach to governance and education (he was pretty openly a socialist, in the old-school sense of the term). Now, you could argue that while Einstein was a good physicist, he was wrong on how to run a society... but that'd be just confirming his thesis. ;-)
Good points overall. Minor niggle with the last sentence. Einstein was probably half right on society. The most successful countries, by some measures, are what I call social market economies. Much of what the socialist movement argued for, is implemented successfully in those countries: social health care, relatively large portion of functional state enterprises (schools, hospitals, infrastructure administration etc.), functional labour unions and more.
A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve.
B) For whatever issue he's trying to solve, he buys every organization that might conceivable oppose him, creating a one-truth world.
For what it's worth, there are prominent people who accuse him of doing the same thing with respect to malaria. To quote Ravitch again:
"The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientists in the field were 'locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,' making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making proces, he charged, was 'a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself.' In a statement that had implications for the foundation's education initiatives, the scientist said that the powerful influence of the foundation 'could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.' In other worlds, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views."