I do not regard his philanthrocapitalism as even as good as straight taxation would have been. His net financial worth is $140B+. Tax $139B of that and he's sti

I do not regard his philanthrocapitalism as even as good as straight taxation would have been. His net financial worth is $140B+. Tax $139B of that and he's still a billionaire. His philanthropy echoes that of Carnegie and others - get rich through any means possible, then use that wealth to whitewash your history via private giving. His "fixing education" hasn't fixed education. His projects are failures, and leave others in the lurch. His billions in funding give undue weight to his amateur, outsider viewpoints over those with domain expertise and experience. For examples, "RAND was selected at the outset of the initiative by the Gates Foundation to evaluate whether the project improved outcomes for students. ... The Gates Foundation sank over $US200 million into the initiative since 2009, with local tax dollars and the federal government adding to the pot. RAND estimates the initiative cost around $US1 billion in total over the seven school years, ... “Our analyses of student test results and graduation rates showed no evidence of widespread positive impact on student outcomes six years after the IP initiative was first funded in 2009-2010,” the RAND study said." Jay Greene, a professor of education at the University of Arkansas [comments] ... the Gates Foundation initiative “appears to have generally done more harm than good.” “It cost a fortune,” Greene writes. “It produced significant political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising efforts.” - https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-education-initiative-failure-2018-6 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-melinda-gates-founda... Or as from https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/05/08/why-bill-gates-is-not-the-man-to-reimagine-new-york-education/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/05/08/why-bill... : > The Gates Foundation has undertaken several projects in education. They have not gone well, and while Gates has always had the ability to walk away from these projects unscathed, not everyone has been so lucky. > At the beginning of the new millennium, Gates decided that perhaps breaking large schools into smaller schools might yield some improvements. Gates spent billions of dollars piloting programs, creating thousands of small schools across the country and ultimately walking away from the project when he decided that it wasn’t producing results. What’s important to note that not only did Gates decide what kinds of structural changes he was paying for, and not only did he leave many districts to figure out what to do next with the half-finished experiment that was their community school system, but Gates also set the terms for what a successful school would look like. You might be able to think of many benefits to having your child in a smaller school, but Gates only looked at three—attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test. > These are factors that can be reduced to data, and data has been a singular focus of Gatesian reform. If data is the new oil, then public schools are the new Texas. The Foundation put at least $100 million into inBloom, a massive project intended to mine data from students and staff at schools. Somehow, backers failed to anticipate that there would be considerable resistance to the idea, and inBloom ended as a massive failure. > The next Gates project was an attempt to improve the teaching profession through training, hiring and evaluation. Again, a mountain of money was spent, and again, the project was ultimately judged a failure—in part, because it did not raise student scores on standardized reading and math scores. And again, the Gates Foundation walked away from the program; Hillsborough School District in Florida was one system left holding a multi-million dollar bag. > Of course, the most infamous Gates education project was the Common Core State Standards. Gates did not invent the Core, but as detailed by Lyndsey Layton in 2014, he provided financial backing, organization, and sheer clout to swiftly push them into every state in the nation. The amount of money that Gates spent to support the Core is hard to know exactly—the sheer number of groups and size of the checks written is staggering. But Gates spending on US education involves billions of dollars and has directly influenced how trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. And while some still argue that the Core was a success, it would be hard to find any broad-based agreement. Perhaps what's broken in education is that people with money and political power think they know how to educate better than educators do, and have more control over education policy? Or, switching to health, and quoting from https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/ https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi... : > Throughout the last two decades, Gates has repeatedly advocated for public health policies that bolster companies’ ability to exclude others from producing lifesaving drugs, including allowing the Gates Foundation itself to acquire substantial intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic. On top of steering the global health community towards Covax rather than patent-free technology sharing, last year Gates bragged about convincing Oxford University not to open-license its vaccine.