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How the Gates Foundation Reflects the Good and the Bad of “Hacker Philanthropy”

39 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

pjscott 11y ago
The argument given here that they should prioritize "obesity, cancer and heart disease" more is ridiculous. Those are a lot harder to deal with than diseases that you can just vaccinate against, like measles or polio -- so, given a finite number of philanthropic dollars, anyone halfway reasonable is going to prioritize the stuff that gives more bang for the buck.
- rjtobin 11y ago
  And this argument really stands at odds with the claim that the Gates Foundation has "done more harm than good". Curing the "wrong" diseases is hardly doing harm.
- lumberjack 11y ago
  The argument is rather that a layman should not be in charge of redirecting talent from one research effort to another, because they are a layman. It's a "utopian should" though. Billionaires can boss people around. Not much to do about it.
  - username223 11y ago
    > Billionaires can boss people around. Not much to do about it. Work toward a system that creates fewer billionaires, maybe?
    - adventured 11y ago
      Ideally we would have drastically more billionaires, so long as they're produced out of economic expansion. The rise of the plentiful billionaire has coincided with lower global inequality, radically lower infant mortality, less war, far greater standards of living globally, increasingly plentiful food and scarcity of famines, increased life expectancy, higher real median incomes, etc. Humanity has never had it better, not even remotely close in fact.
      - username223 11y ago
        Ideally we'd have drastically more $100k-ionaires, i.e. people who don't have to worry about basic needs, but who aren't rich enough to manipulate laws and their fellow humans to their own advantage. Unfortunately, things haven't been headed that way for the past few decades.
- ghufran_syed 11y ago
  Not only are "obesity, cancer and heart disease" harder problems, they are diseases of wealth: if many in your country die of infectious disease, they are not alive long enough to get cancer or heart disease. The author is essentially suggesting that the gates should spend more money on rich people's health rather than that of the poor. Quite astonishing.
imh 11y ago
>How might Gates spend its money more wisely? McGoey offers little guidance on this. This is the crux of the article to me. These problems don't have known solutions. The options are to do expensive research/experiments or just keep the status quo. The status quo doesn't work, so let's do some exploration, like Gates did. There are difficult ethics involved, but if you think something will do better I would argue it's unethical to ignore it. The real touchy issue is how to do that and minimize the impact of inevitably being wrong sometimes.
lemming 11y ago
Though the World Health Organization spends more than Gates does on health... Regardless of its purported problems, the fact that you can have a sentence like this about a private organisation is amazing.
jkire 11y ago
Most of the arguments seem to boil down to the equivalent of "they tried X, it didn't work, they should have used the money better". When trying to reform any system, be it software, business or education, risks almost always have to be taken to get any meaningful results. That being said, it would be really interesting to read a dissection on how much philanthropists (especially new "hacker philanthropists") acknowledge that there are risks, and how they weigh those risks up. After all, the consequences of making mistakes when trying to reform an education system can have a large and lasting effect on the students involved.
orionblastar 11y ago
The problem is this, he is trying to solve problems with the same thinking that went to build Microsoft and make him a billionaire. These problems have to be solved with a different type of thinking than the ones that caused rivals to Microsoft to go out of business and cause people to lose their jobs and go into poverty. Public education has a problem where most students are poor and suffer emotional and psychological issues that make it hard to study and focus on work. Many have broken homes and dysfunctional families. You can't just throw money at a problem like that and expect it to be solved. Not unless you are using the money to make sure those families are no longer poor and have money to raise them to a middle class income. But you can't just pay them money, you have to create jobs they can work for that pays them the money. With Microsoft they earn money by automating things that eliminate jobs, and people enter poverty when their jobs are eliminated and they aren't qualified for any other sort of work. So you'd have to set up an education for the student's parents to get them better jobs so they can get out of poverty.
username223 11y ago
> ...increased data collection on teacher effectiveness, the introduction of performance-based teacher pay... A friend of mine teaches music in a public school, and half of his performance review depends upon his students' math and english scores (à la Common Core). Many of his students were raised in families that don't value education. And if all of that absurdity isn't enough, he's making a lousy salary, with the prospect of making a modest living in five years if he plays the administrative game well and gets a bit lucky. It's not that complicated: if we paid teachers like we pay coders, we would have better teachers. That would cost something like 1% of GDP per capita in the US.

39 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

The argument given here that they should prioritize "obesity, cancer and heart disease" more is ridiculous. Those are a lot harder to deal with than diseases that you can just vaccinate against, like measles or polio -- so, given a finite number of philanthropic dollars, anyone halfway reasonable is going to prioritize the stuff that gives more bang for the buck.

rjtobin 11y ago
And this argument really stands at odds with the claim that the Gates Foundation has "done more harm than good". Curing the "wrong" diseases is hardly doing harm.
lumberjack 11y ago
The argument is rather that a layman should not be in charge of redirecting talent from one research effort to another, because they are a layman. It's a "utopian should" though. Billionaires can boss people around. Not much to do about it.
- username223 11y ago
  > Billionaires can boss people around. Not much to do about it. Work toward a system that creates fewer billionaires, maybe?
  - adventured 11y ago
    Ideally we would have drastically more billionaires, so long as they're produced out of economic expansion. The rise of the plentiful billionaire has coincided with lower global inequality, radically lower infant mortality, less war, far greater standards of living globally, increasingly plentiful food and scarcity of famines, increased life expectancy, higher real median incomes, etc. Humanity has never had it better, not even remotely close in fact.
    - username223 11y ago
      Ideally we'd have drastically more $100k-ionaires, i.e. people who don't have to worry about basic needs, but who aren't rich enough to manipulate laws and their fellow humans to their own advantage. Unfortunately, things haven't been headed that way for the past few decades.
ghufran_syed 11y ago
Not only are "obesity, cancer and heart disease" harder problems, they are diseases of wealth: if many in your country die of infectious disease, they are not alive long enough to get cancer or heart disease. The author is essentially suggesting that the gates should spend more money on rich people's health rather than that of the poor. Quite astonishing.

imh 11y ago

>How might Gates spend its money more wisely? McGoey offers little guidance on this. This is the crux of the article to me. These problems don't have known solutions. The options are to do expensive research/experiments or just keep the status quo. The status quo doesn't work, so let's do some exploration, like Gates did. There are difficult ethics involved, but if you think something will do better I would argue it's unethical to ignore it. The real touchy issue is how to do that and minimize the impact of inevitably being wrong sometimes.

lemming 11y ago

Though the World Health Organization spends more than Gates does on health... Regardless of its purported problems, the fact that you can have a sentence like this about a private organisation is amazing.

jkire 11y ago

Most of the arguments seem to boil down to the equivalent of "they tried X, it didn't work, they should have used the money better". When trying to reform any system, be it software, business or education, risks almost always have to be taken to get any meaningful results. That being said, it would be really interesting to read a dissection on how much philanthropists (especially new "hacker philanthropists") acknowledge that there are risks, and how they weigh those risks up. After all, the consequences of making mistakes when trying to reform an education system can have a large and lasting effect on the students involved.

orionblastar 11y ago

The problem is this, he is trying to solve problems with the same thinking that went to build Microsoft and make him a billionaire. These problems have to be solved with a different type of thinking than the ones that caused rivals to Microsoft to go out of business and cause people to lose their jobs and go into poverty. Public education has a problem where most students are poor and suffer emotional and psychological issues that make it hard to study and focus on work. Many have broken homes and dysfunctional families. You can't just throw money at a problem like that and expect it to be solved. Not unless you are using the money to make sure those families are no longer poor and have money to raise them to a middle class income. But you can't just pay them money, you have to create jobs they can work for that pays them the money. With Microsoft they earn money by automating things that eliminate jobs, and people enter poverty when their jobs are eliminated and they aren't qualified for any other sort of work. So you'd have to set up an education for the student's parents to get them better jobs so they can get out of poverty.

username223 11y ago

> ...increased data collection on teacher effectiveness, the introduction of performance-based teacher pay... A friend of mine teaches music in a public school, and half of his performance review depends upon his students' math and english scores (à la Common Core). Many of his students were raised in families that don't value education. And if all of that absurdity isn't enough, he's making a lousy salary, with the prospect of making a modest living in five years if he plays the administrative game well and gets a bit lucky. It's not that complicated: if we paid teachers like we pay coders, we would have better teachers. That would cost something like 1% of GDP per capita in the US.