8 ms·

Bill Gates: Capitalism means male baldness gets more funding than malaria

134 points by dsego 14y ago

tezza 14y ago
This is straight out of "Idiocracy" ! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.
- ksherlock 14y ago
  Minoxidil (Rogaine) and sildenafil citrate (Viagra) were both created to treat high blood pressure. Turns out they had side effects.
- morsch 14y ago
  Also advertisement, social profiling and of course weapons, weapons, weapons, weapons. Not that this is limited to just capitalism or even necessarily inherent to all incarnations of that particular system.
- arrrg 14y ago
  Idiocracy is such a stupid movie. Worst: People take it seriously. As in: As if it actually had some sort of meaningful or true message (even in satirical form). That’s just sad.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Before someone posts "releveant XKCD,"[2] I'd like to head it off by asking what XKCD thinks is wrong about Idiocracy. Are people with higher IQ really having more kids, unlike the movie says, or is the Flynn Effect[1] pushing IQs up despite people with higher IQ having less kids? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2] http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
    - Retric 14y ago
      Evolution is way to slow to be showing significant effects. The Flynn Effect is mostly a consequence of better nutrition and like increased height it's slowed down a lot in the US. Another long term trend in in reverse is people have stopped living longer in the US and life expectancy is decreasing. However, poor and uneducated does not mean genetically dumb. People with really low IQ's are far less likely to have kids. Comparing people with sub 60 IQ's with over 140 IQ's the smarter people have more kids.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      Having kids or not having kids is mostly an issue of: * Money/class * Laws and social status * Time-to-adulthood for your culture Educated, middle-class people in Western countries have stopped having kids en masse largely because the first and last factors on that last have risen, massively. It now takes large amounts of time and money for educated, middle-class parents to raise a child to their own level (ie: an educated, middle-class adult), and the process has extremely many points of potential failure. It's often not even likely enough to succeed; for instance, if you live somewhere with bad schools or need your entire 20s to establish your own career before you can afford to feed a child.
      - xyzzy123 14y ago
        Aww it's pretty cheap to feed a child, but raising them in a socially acceptable way for your cohort might be expensive.
        eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        Minimally feed one? Yes. Feed, clothe and care for them "properly", so that measures of their total health (like for example, their height) wind up in strong greater-than-or-equal correlation with parents who are already decently-off? Takes a bunch of effort.
        xyzzy123 14y ago
        I think we're saying the same thing except that you believe it's more expensive to make sure kids have shoes and aren't stunted than I do. > Takes a bunch of effort. 100% with you on that one.
  - username111 14y ago
    Some truth rings through the satire, like the television that appeals to the masses. Except instead of Ow my balls we have reality tv (though wipeout is pretty close to the former). There are plenty of stupid things in the movie but that doesn't mean the social commentary isn't without insight.
  - tezza 14y ago
    Come on, it was just a funny movie along the lines of Dumb and Dumber, Harold & Kumar or Fletch. There was some vague sci-fi mashed up with societal critique, but really this was a pretext to get Gun toting presidents, morons and scantily clad chics on screen with a fish-out-of-water present day man.
    - arrrg 14y ago
      Hey, it’s one of my favorite dumb movies. I have no problem with it as a movie. I have a problem with people saying that it has some sort of profound message. Yeah, it satirizes current-day stupidity pretty well (and I like that) but I do not think it makes any reasonable statements about humanity’s future.
duaneb 14y ago
Nitpick, title implies people are funding malaria.
- pyre 14y ago
  It also means that male baldness is being funded.
  - dsego 14y ago
    The original was too long, so I removed 'research'.
Shivetya 14y ago
It also means there are more chances for individuals to have the wherewithal to step in and correct the deficiencies they perceive in their life and the lives of those around them.
jlank 14y ago
It also means that some people (like Gates), that greatly succeed in a capitalist society, who has never been personally affected by Malaria (that I know of), can allocate money, awareness, and research towards a solution.
- freyr 14y ago
  Gates has never been personally affected by male baldness either (that I know of). I wonder if he'd make the comparison if he was one of the millions of sufferers of m.b. We need to find a cure, now.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Hey, fellow “sufferer” here. (And a young one: visibly started when I was 23/24, now I’m 25 and it’s totally obvious.) No, we do not need to find a cure. Sure, it would be nice if there were one, but that surely ranks far below curing Malaria. Baldness is a minor inconvenience. It doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t make people sick, unproductive or reduces their lifespan. Personal note: whiney bald people who act as if baldness were some sort of serious ailment are the worst. (I’m not sure whether you are serious or just joking. I have read bald people write like you, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were serious.)
  - conradfr 14y ago
    Currently a bald guy manage the company he has hundreds of million of shares of.
  - padraigm 14y ago
    Hormone replacement therapy stops and in some cases reverses mpb. Maybe not the solution you were looking for, though.
grantismo 14y ago
It seems like the value of a human life should be greater (than solving male baldness) in financial terms in addition to humanist terms over the long time period. Wouldn't it make more sense for Gates to make a capitalist argument for why investing in malaria research should be more profitable than investing in male baldness?
- CodeCube 14y ago
  But that's the problem ... it's not, or at least is very difficult to convince the average person of it. If you're a middle aged dentist in Wyoming making $127k (http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Dentist-Salary-Details-Casper-WY.aspx http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Dentist-Salary-Details-Ca...), what are you more likely to spend your money on ... large donations to malaria research, or a monthly payment to the hair club for men so you can look better and try to have an affair with the hot dental assistant? That may be a very jaded view of what the average person would do, but tell me it's wrong.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    You can't compare that. You can't compare a person spending on themself versus a person donating to a cause. Or else you'll make a suggestion that we all move to slums because it's not fair that we get to live in an actual house when not everyone can afford that.
  - nightski 14y ago
    It's wrong because it makes the assumption that it is either hair club for men or malaria research. Also I don't think hair club for men = large donation to malaria research. It is far cheaper.
- xyzzy123 14y ago
  Sadly the capitalistic value of a life is relative and it correlates with earnings. There are public policy numbers which generally aren't talked about. In most western countries you can figure the value of a life on order of about 10 million dollars or so. Empirically, lives are valued on the high side of lifetime possible earnings, something like double the average wage * 100 years or so. Do we fix an intersection to prevent the high statistical likelihood of a death? What about a swimming pool danger PR campaign? Political swing matters more, but the dispassionate (and rational) way of doing it uses life valuation. Giving people with money hardons and a full head of hair is enormously more profitable than public spending (or charity expenditure) in poor countries. To the point where it is rational expenditure based on numbers :( Also, you can't really charge people for not getting malaria. You can try and get their government to pay for it though. I'm not saying this is right.
jerf 14y ago
It's not "capitalism", it's humanity. Governments do not magically make perfectly rational allocations of funds either. For instance, see http://www.csulb.edu/~acarter3/pdfs/carter-nguyen-BMCPublicHealth2012=cancer-funding-analysis.pdf http://www.csulb.edu/~acarter3/pdfs/carter-nguyen-BMCPublicH... for a staggeringly complete overview of the government cancer money allocation, including measurement by multiple different possible metrics. (My compliments to the chefs on that paper.)
- jbooth 14y ago
  Of course they don't, but then nobody argues that. You can find a ton of people who will argue that capitalism quote 'magically makes perfectly rational allocations of funds'.
  - jerf 14y ago
    I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone claim that capitalism guarantees "perfectly rational" allocation of charity. More efficient charity I've seen argued, but not rationally allocated charity. If no system in use anywhere is making rational allocations, it's misleading to try to name one as the problem. (And it's the sort of misleading that leads people to solve the wrong problem, so it's not harmless, either.)
    - damoncali 14y ago
      If no system in use anywhere is making rational allocations... I would go further and say that no system can make rational allocations because definitions of 'rational' vary quite radically.
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        I would go so far as to say that people who worry about the dangers of unfriendly superoptimizer intelligences need to look at the massively distributed unfriendly superoptimizer running on the abstracted meatware of human relationships and conveniently labeled "capitalism".
venus 14y ago
These two issues are nigh incomparable. One is a simple medical cure for rich first world country people. Well, not simple, but simple to sell if you've got the answer. Malaria, on the other hand, is not a product or an answer to a research problem. It's a symptom of - basically - bad government in certain parts of the world. We're not looking for a cure because there is no cure, or we're not interested in using the only cure we do know of - recolonialisation. That's the only cure which might work within 10 years. All of these issues that come under the umbrella term of "poor people problems" are of this category. They're actually bad society/government problems, and they're a devil to fix, and simply throwing money at the problem arguably just makes it worse. So we do what we can - slowly, slowly, carefully try to help them build a better society and a better class of living for their citizens. And it does seem to work, kind of, slowly.
- Ygg2 14y ago
  What!? Recolonisation? What a stupid thing to say. That's like solving someone's money problem by giving them cheap credits they can never return. Or solving thirst by drinking sea water. Colonisation leads to conflict, which leads to Decolonisation, which returns them back where they started only they wasted both just time and sometimes people's lives. Want to help them? Look at their native populace and find outliers (people that have least amount of malaria), then analyze what these people do that reduces their contact with malaria, and spread those methods to other people. If those methods are successful spread them, if not go back to start of paragraph. Rinse, repeat.
  - venus 14y ago
    Since you speak English, you were almost certainly born in a colonised country. Yes, it can indeed go badly. And if you had thought for 10 seconds before typing your outraged reply, you can probably think of a few cases where it has gone well. Ironically, your "solution" requires either being, or having the cooperation of, the government in the affected territory, so you're actually agreeing with me.
    - Ygg2 14y ago
api 14y ago
Yes, and a casino is more profitable than a hospital, and "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, that sucks." (Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook.) Communism is dead, socialism is dead, fascism is dead, god is dead, and now market fundamentalist capitalism is dying. Of course all these things still have their True Believers, but as time goes on the ranks of those true believers dwindle and it becomes increasingly difficult to find serious and widely educated thinkers among them. This is interesting. Ideology with a capital I is a big part of how human beings model and conceptualize the world. I think what we're seeing is that our cognitive modeling capabilities have limits. Our models break down. It honestly reminds me of the trends that sweep through the computer programming world: object oriented, aspect oriented, functional, MVC, late binding, strong typing, weak typing, multiparadigm, templates, and so on... all work well for a while and then show their weaknesses. P.S. The big thing that killed market fundamentalism for me was doing a stint in business consulting and seeing what the average rich person actually is: a glorified street hustler. I was once a bit of a Randian... it was a real "the emperor has no clothes" moment. (I can think of a few rich folks who remind me of Rand heroes... a very, very, very few. I don't think I would run out of fingers. Elon Musk would be at the top of the list. Oh, but wait, his enterprises are quasi-philanthropic ventures...)
- thebmax 14y ago
  Capitalism also allowed Bill Gates to make $60 billion so he could donate it to finding a cure for malaria.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Far far rather have Bill Gates deciding how to spend $60 bn than Congress / Parliament. Just seems more likely to get bang per buck.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Really, as far as my personnel spending priorities go Bill Gates has wasted close to 100% of his charitable donations. Which I would not care about, however he get's a huge (multi billion dollar) tax break on donations which is simply a staggering waste of money. PS: Want to pay people to pray for world piece? That's a tax break after-all we don't actually need to repair roads and bridges or pay down debt.
mgkimsal 14y ago
It's in capitalism's interest to keep more of these people alive to sell them more stuff. Someone dying of malaria at age 7 doesn't get a chance to go bald in the first place, hence fewer sales of baldness cures.
- mertd 14y ago
  The bald guy in the first world makes more money in a year than the malaria kid would make in his/her lifetime.
joonix 14y ago
Yet it's capitalism that ends up financing the malaria vaccine. It just had to go through Gates first.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Well yeah. That's why you're never supposed to have pure, unalloyed capitalism, any more than you want pure and unalloyed anything. Monoculture always leads to death.
joshuahedlund 14y ago
Recently, when hearing about Gates's health initiatives along with the US discussions about tax rates, I thought that if the government had taken significantly more of Bill Gates's wealth through taxes, they probably would not have globally reduced diseases like malaria with those few billions of dollars as much as Bill Gates will with his own allocation. Not saying that's an argument against any higher tax rates, etc, but it's an interesting thought.
- hereonbusiness 14y ago
  Interesting thought, in 2009 the US government spent $139 billion on health research. http://www.researchamerica.org/uploads/healthdollar09.pdf http://www.researchamerica.org/uploads/healthdollar09.pdf What if most rich people do not give a damn, and just keep all their money for themselves, where would medical research be then ?
scotch_drinker 14y ago
And breast cancer gets more funding than pancreatic cancer even though pancreatic cancer kills about everyone who gets it because, you know, the boobies. As far as malaria is concerned, DDT turns out to be real effective at killing mosquitoes, the major problem in the developing world of LOTS of infectious diseases. But those of us in the developed world got more concerned with the eagles and stuff and essentially go out of our way to keep DDT from being used even though it's use in the developing world would literally save tens of thousands of human lives. The governments of the developed world did that, not capitalism. It's a grey world out there and while it's much easier to get clicks with "male baldness gets more funding than malaria so capitalism doesn't work", it's not really very helpful in actually fixing things.
- speeder 14y ago
  Also I would like to note that prostate cancer exist in the same amounts as breast cancer, and has much less research funding... And there are some nasty politics related to that, including prostate cancer researchers being labelled "misogynists" or "patriarchalists" just because they called our that breast cancer has more funding.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    Prostate cancer is dramatically less virulent, isn't it? To the point where the medical community is starting to say early screening can be a negative thing, because loads of folks get surgery for cancer that never would've killed them?
  - aroberge 14y ago
    Lots of men die of old age with prostate cancer, not because of it. Breast cancer is a far deadlier disease, one that strikes more young people, women and men (rate of incidence about 1% that of women).
  - objclxt 14y ago
    It's a little more nuanced than that. 1.47% of women aged 40 will develop breast cancer within ten years, but only 0.34% of men aged 40 will develop prostate cancer over a similar time period (according to the CDC risk statistics). 0.01% of 30 year old men will develop prostate cancer within ten years, as opposed to 0.44% for women/breast cancer. That's a huge difference. One of the reasons there is more funding for breast cancer is that it often manifests itself earlier, meaning the benefits of treating it in terms of years saved is much greater.
speeder 14y ago
I know it might sound evil. But the market still does not reflect what people want? Most people don't have malaria, they don't care about malaria, and they will only care if it affects them. It is not that capitalism is evil regarding that, but why a person living in Japan for example will care if someone half planet away that have zero interaction with him will die? Now suppose that farmers that make your food are plagued with some disease... This would make your food expensive, and this would make you want to heal them, so they make your food cheap again. What happens today, is that the news about the world are faster than the economic interactions, you feel pity for people in blasted places, but you don't need them, most people don't need them, so most people won't care for them. Now tell me, if someone had asked for donations to do more research on the cancer that killed Steve Jobs, I am sure lots of people would help, not because they like Steve Jobs or because it is noble to do so, but because they like what he did. Face it, even collectivist humans are still thinking about themselves, humans either think about themselves only (the ultimate individualism) or about their immediate community. Few people care about a person with no genetic relation to you, that live half planet away, and have no economic interaction with you, either as buyer or seller.
- api 14y ago
  The market does excel at giving people what they want. That's not a feature. It's a bug. "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (possibly apocryphal, but probably true) Markets pander. They do not elevate. I do not want what I want. I want things that are so much better than what I want that I have not imagined them yet. Think about when you see a movie or read a book. Isn't it boring if someone's already told you the plot? You want to be surprised, and you're usually disappointed if things turned out the way you expected them to. Of course, markets do have virtues. They excel at solving multi-dimensional resource allocation problems in the short term, and they excel at taking new things and delivering them to customers. Big science bureaucracies and such are good at discovering and inventing, but they suck at shipping. The "pirates of Silicon Valley" invented little, but they shipped.
  - 1123581321 14y ago
    Markets excel at giving people what they want in the long term, too. For example, the Henry Ford you quoted built a car company that became one of the most successful in the world. There is nothing about markets that prevent entrepreneurs from selling innovative products and it happens all the time. Entrepreneurs creating new things and then selling them is so common that on Hacker News, people like Steve Blank and Eric Ries have made names for themselves encouraging entrepreneurs to listen to the market even just a little bit.
protomyth 14y ago
Well, yeah. Humans are pretty poor at basic risk assessment and very tuned into their own needs. The economic system doesn't matter much, its basic human nature.
melling 14y ago
That's because consumers will allocate money to pay for baldness. That's where the money is. We all understand that, now please quit complaining and figure out how to get consumers to pay for other advances. For example, we pay for Moore's law by buying new computers and iPhones every few years. We will start paying for huge advances in robotics once they can do more of the house chores and yard work. We need to get to the tipping point. As for advances in biology and the cures for diseases, I'm not sure how to approach that. However, if we could funnel billions more from the consumer sector, we'll cure cancer, the common cold, etc. years sooner.
- tjr 14y ago
  When I go to Pet Smart to buy dog food, the credit card reader asks me if I want to donate $1, $5, $10, etc., to help homeless animals. I imagine that if I was at Walgreen's buying NyQuil and the credit card reader asked me if I wanted to donate $1, $5, $10, toward medical research so that people just like me can get over a cold faster in the future, I'd probably say yes.
  - melling 14y ago
    You'll spend $200 for a new smartphone every few years. Samsung and Apple are fighting a war to make the better phone. Billions are spent. Likewise, Intel and ARM are competing for the future of the CPU. Someday soon, someone like iRobot will be competing with another company to automate the home. The "Apple II" of home robotics isn't too far off? The race starts then. Now find a way to commercialize companies that will also do more medical research. We do have big pharma but that research takes many years.
    - tjr 14y ago
      I don't think that people want to spend money on medicine like they want to spend money on phones. Even when they are ill, it comes across as more of a necessity than something inherently desirable, though at least when feeling ill they might give more thought to how much nicer things would be if medicines worked better than they do now. But to expect folks to cash their paychecks, run out to the store and buy some new cough syrup just because it's so cool?... that's what happens with phones, but it seems unlikely to happen with medicine. And in fact that'd be ridiculous. If one isn't even feeling ill, why should they go out and buy medicine? Unless they are buying it for someone else, but this sort of gets us into the realm of charity and donations. I don't know; what do you think? What sort of situation can you imagine in which a consumer treats funding medical research the same way they treat buying a new phone?
jevinskie 14y ago
A related story from TIME Magazine in 2008: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1828417,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1828417,00.html
hugh4life 14y ago
As someone who has just started balding, I have to cry bullshit on this. The only two medical treatments for male pattern baldness were found by accident... Minoxidil was created to treat blood pressure issues and Finasteride was created for prostate issues.
- sauravc 14y ago
  I'm sorry for your loss, but how does it make you an expert on how much funding is given to malaria vs male pattern balding research?
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    When billg says "if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding" is he only counting the unfruitful research into baldness, or is he also counting the blood pressure and prostate research that accidentally led to baldness treatments?
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Capitalism used to include having to provision a private army to protect your home, and keep the caravans safe from marauders along the trade routes. Now it does not. In the future it will be more profitable to cure malaria than male pattern baldness. How do we get there? I am not sure, but having one of the most respected business figures in the world holler about it will help.
robmcm 14y ago
Easy for a man with a full head of hair to say. Or is this just a swipe at Balmer?
isleyaardvark 14y ago
>Ideally you create a business model that lets you get your margin from the rich countries and the middle income countries, or through tiering customers in developing countries." He cited eye clinics in India that offer free lens replacement and other treatments to the poor but charges those who can afford it as a good example of a tiered system. It seems like pharmaceutical companies come under a lot of fire for that kind of approach.
scythe 14y ago
I guess I get to be the guy to defend hair research. The reason this gets so much attention is that androgenic alopecia is linked to metabolic syndrome. This also means it is linked to, for example, polycystic ovary syndrome and... heart disease and diabetes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenic_alopecia#Male_homologue_to_PCOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenic_alopecia#Male_homolo... Yes, really. The fact that it's [alopecia] linked to some of the leading causes of death in the developed world might help to explain some of the research money. Of course that doesn't mean he isn't still essentially right that malaria deserves to get more money. This still, of course, reflects an implicit difference of focus between rich people and poor people. Rich people have money and they spend it on themselves, not others -- but it [the research funding] isn't just an outgrowth of simple vanity. Also, the reason we have treatments rather than cures is that the cure is horrifying. AA is caused by -- on a simple chemical level -- androgens. Read: testosterone. Finasteride et al. inhibit them. You want a cure: cut your balls off, that's the cure.
- drpgq 14y ago
  I wonder how much baldness research actually does go on, since the two main drugs weren't discovered by researchers working on baldness?
zosima 14y ago
Yes, this is an interesting effect of capitalism: locally significant but globally quite irrelevant issues gets more resources allocated to them than globally significant but not locally sensible investments. That's of course bad. The immediate alternative: government allocates funds to locally insignificant and because of prestige, buy-in and general politics, eventually globally worthless investments, is also not very attractive. Actually, one may see Bill Gates as an example of why capitalism is advantageous. Being allowed to amass a significant portion of wealth, he can now choose to spend it on efforts he considers good. As long as his interest is to use his money for purposes he considers the greater good, the money will certainly have a greater effect than government's spending of the same resources would. Think what you will of the Malaria problem. But I think that giving larger amounts of resources to certain individuals (just kings) is one of the most efficient ways of allocating resources. Now, the main problem with modern capitalism is this: Why do so few just kings arise from the very wealthy? Most very rich seem incapable of creating or living by any sentiment or value-system that goes beyond their own self-indulgence. Why is that? And how to make a system where the people that rise create value and values?
- chii 14y ago
  perhaps having a sense of morals and ethics means you end up not being as ruthless and thus less likely to earn the big bucks.
voxfrege 14y ago
This is a very narrow view. What the article should be saying is that with every dollar you do not spend for fight against deadly diseases, well, you're effectively let people die. That means, you (not capitalism), as the owner of a computer or an iPhone, value watching cat videos higher than helping people not to die. This, of course, is such a heavy moral burden that you're happy someone comes along and blames it on "capitalism".
- chii 14y ago
  there is no moral burden on you for not using you available wealth to help the poor. selfishness is a natural state of things. i respect and admirer people who go Wismar against their natural state to give allergically altrustically, but i will never judge someone for not wanting to donate.
bjhoops1 14y ago
The fact is that the Private Sector solves problems exclusively for people who can pay for them. In other words, how useful the Private Sector is to you is a direct function of your income. The Public Sector may be inefficient and costly, but if you don't have money, it's the only Sector that gives a shit about you. Which is why it infuriates me to see invariably affluent, educated professionals preaching the Gospel of Free Markets and Small Government to the shiftless masses, with their petty concerns like Health Insurance. Why can't they just buy anything they need? Conservative/Libertarian types like to pontificate about how the 47% will always vote for policies which take from the Randian Supermen (which they fancy themselves) to distribute to the Moochers, yet they fail to recognize how easy it is for someone with an income in the top 10% to dismiss the Social Welfare programs which they will never themselves be in need of as "wasteful spending". The Hypocrisy! In Software Development, we like to say that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The experienced developer knows that different tools have different uses, and does not get caught up in holy wars advocating for her favorite design pattern or algorithm. I wish that people would look at the public/private sector debate with that kind of maturity - the Public and Private sectors are well suited for some issues, and poorly suited for others. The question is to determine which is the better fit for a given scenario. To reflexively advocate for either Private or Public solutions in every scenario is foolish, like the undergraduate Comp Sci student who just discovered recursion and wants to solve every problem that way. Let's try to move past Ideology and on to Problem Solving.
- crusso 14y ago
  Which is why it infuriates me to see invariably affluent, educated professionals preaching the Gospel of Free Markets and Small Government to the shiftless masses, with their petty concerns like Health Insurance. Why can't they just buy anything they need? Your understanding of their motivations is deficient. You seem intelligent, maybe you could spend some time understanding their argument. If you do understand their argument, why misstate it? It's not so much they think, "Why can't they just buy anything they need?". It's that they (we) think, "These masterminds who lie by telling voters that they can set up this magical one-size-fits-all healthcare system and work it efficiently are just trying to grab power and votes for themselves. It's a horrible idea to set up yet another governmental dependency that is doomed to fail like all the others. Already, the system will cost triple what we were told. We have seen that 'You can keep your own insurance' was a lie. It contains numerous hidden taxes and costs. When will we ever learn?"
jskonhovd 14y ago
Capitalism is not the problem. It's our culture. We need to find a way to funnel more people into STEM jobs. The west has failed. India and China have drastically different governments but they both have been able to do one thing. Produce Engineers.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Male baldness occurs late in life - high value individuals have had a chance to accumulate wealth. Malaria hits early, before potential earnings have accumulated. Though it hits poor people, the potential lifetime excess incomes of malaria victims should rival that of males willing to spend on baldness. Thus, we have an issue of time horizons - finance knows how to solve this! A coalition of African governments could create an X Prize for a malaria cure, committing to a certain level of expenditure, e.g. 30% of the population within 10 years, for a cure or vaccine that meets certain efficacy and cost hurdles. Theoretically, taxes on the salvaged incomes would pay for the safety net - this presupposes a reasonable level of productivity. A coalition willing to levy a conditional tax on its population for when a cure meeting certain efficacy and cost hurdles becomes available should also qualify for some sort of multilateral backstop, thus increasing the probability of the "prize" being paid. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations did not speak about the economy alone, but of the political economy. Talking about capitalism absent the institutions that frame the market is vacuous. Philanthropy is a good balm, but I reject that malaria is immune to the vectors which are fighting male baldness.
natmaster 14y ago
But it also means malaria gets more funding than it would otherwise.
mikebludd 14y ago
This guy sucks the joy out of being successful. Him and the oppressor of Omaha are my least favourite bourgeios.
frogpelt 14y ago
Capitalism is what created the billions of dollars that Bill Gates has in his Gates Foundation to spend on things like curing malaria. Double-edged sword.
matterhorn 14y ago
Capitalism also means DDT, which kills mosquitoes that are vectors for malaria. However, statist intervention bans DDT and allows mosquito populations to thrive, thus killing large numbers of people in places like Gambia where...wait a minute! Places like Gambia where malaria rates are in free-fall! And why? Because of the use of insecticide treated netting...(kinda makes you wonder what kind of drop in malaria rates could be achieved through DDT, huh?) See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030203243.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030203243.ht... So, socialism and enviro-wacko statist intervention gets people killed by malaria through bans on insecticides, which turn out to be the most effective counters to malaria.
known 14y ago
I thought Gates made fortune due to Capitalism
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
What I find interesting is that malaria gets less funding because the countries with malaria are so poor. And they are poor because of their governments are bad. And if a country with malaria suddenly started to grow quickly, it itself would also quickly solve its malaria problem. So what do charities do? They fund malaria cures, not government reform. They fund the treatment of symptoms, not the root cause. And why don't we fund the root cause? It turns out it may well be much harder than curing malaria. How do you un-corrupt a thoroughly corrupt government? And Europe has a horrific colonial history with the developing world, especially Africa. First worlders attempting to dictate what and how 3rd world leaders should do would be embarrassingly reminiscent of colonialism. And here embarrassing means leader might lose the perceived power which keeps them in office. And lastly donor countries tend to have laws against corruption which would punish charities for paying off foreign leaders. Even if they are paying them off to reduce poverty or something good like that. So here is a totally crazy idea. Make an exception to foreign corruption laws if the cause is worth it. Then offer secret payment to developing world leaders if they meet certain metrics. And also offer them advice on what to do to meet the metrics. And do it all in secret. Imagine Kim Jong Un one day suddenly starts slowl and steady market reforms. Imagine 10 years later North Korea is growing quite fast, and Kim Jong Un is a dedicated fighter of corruption. Imagine Kim Jong Un himself starts to encourage direct democracy, first at village level and then higher. Imagine a few years later Kim Jong Un gives an emotional speech about the two Koreas being one, liberty and democracy in the North, and then resigns leaving a Swiss like democratically chosen group of people in charge, and a North Korean government structure looking quite similar to that of Switzerland. Then Kim Jong Un moves to southern California with a mysterious fortune of several billion dollars, a universal pardon from the US president, and protection from foreign prosecution in the states.
- chii 14y ago
  why would kim so all of that when he can already live it up like a King right now? having a few bil in money isnt enough to replace what he has right now, which I'd essentially evwrything in NK...
davidf18 14y ago
Read Andy Kessler's WSJ article from today. It provides an answer: Want to Change the World? How About a Billion-Dollar Prize http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323628804578348002211277908.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732362880457834... You can google for the story to get beyond the paywall if you need to.
znowi 14y ago
I really respect this guy. At the time when Apple et al stockpile their gold, he puts his money up for a noble cause.
cryptonector 14y ago
He's wrong. The lack of capitalism where malaria abounds is the reason that malaria gets little funding (assuming that's even so; I've not checked). If you want to improve the lot of people, give them capitalism. Bill Gates is a great example of the aphorism "trust capitalism, not capitalists". He's a capitalist, but he himself does not believe in capitalism. It's like the quip about Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies: "by one of its enemies". Gates lacks the authority on this subject that his success would appear to lend him. Beware!
cryptonector 14y ago
Capitalism isn't an idea, like, say, socialism. Capitalism is something that arises organically in societies that allow their citizens/residents freedom. The alternative to capitalism isn't a different economic organization. The alternative to capitalism is not-freedom. Those who say (like @api in the first post) that capitalism is dying and imply (or state) that we need an alternative, either mean to take freedom away from us, or don't know that that's what they mean.
drequivalent 14y ago
Says one of the most prominent capitalists ever-ever existed. Oh, this is the irony so hard it broke my spine.

134 points by dsego 14y ago

tezza 14y ago

This is straight out of "Idiocracy" ! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.

ksherlock 14y ago
Minoxidil (Rogaine) and sildenafil citrate (Viagra) were both created to treat high blood pressure. Turns out they had side effects.
morsch 14y ago
Also advertisement, social profiling and of course weapons, weapons, weapons, weapons. Not that this is limited to just capitalism or even necessarily inherent to all incarnations of that particular system.
arrrg 14y ago
Idiocracy is such a stupid movie. Worst: People take it seriously. As in: As if it actually had some sort of meaningful or true message (even in satirical form). That’s just sad.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Before someone posts "releveant XKCD,"[2] I'd like to head it off by asking what XKCD thinks is wrong about Idiocracy. Are people with higher IQ really having more kids, unlike the movie says, or is the Flynn Effect[1] pushing IQs up despite people with higher IQ having less kids? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2] http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
  - Retric 14y ago
    Evolution is way to slow to be showing significant effects. The Flynn Effect is mostly a consequence of better nutrition and like increased height it's slowed down a lot in the US. Another long term trend in in reverse is people have stopped living longer in the US and life expectancy is decreasing. However, poor and uneducated does not mean genetically dumb. People with really low IQ's are far less likely to have kids. Comparing people with sub 60 IQ's with over 140 IQ's the smarter people have more kids.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    Having kids or not having kids is mostly an issue of: * Money/class * Laws and social status * Time-to-adulthood for your culture Educated, middle-class people in Western countries have stopped having kids en masse largely because the first and last factors on that last have risen, massively. It now takes large amounts of time and money for educated, middle-class parents to raise a child to their own level (ie: an educated, middle-class adult), and the process has extremely many points of potential failure. It's often not even likely enough to succeed; for instance, if you live somewhere with bad schools or need your entire 20s to establish your own career before you can afford to feed a child.
    - xyzzy123 14y ago
      Aww it's pretty cheap to feed a child, but raising them in a socially acceptable way for your cohort might be expensive.
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        Minimally feed one? Yes. Feed, clothe and care for them "properly", so that measures of their total health (like for example, their height) wind up in strong greater-than-or-equal correlation with parents who are already decently-off? Takes a bunch of effort.
        xyzzy123 14y ago
        I think we're saying the same thing except that you believe it's more expensive to make sure kids have shoes and aren't stunted than I do. > Takes a bunch of effort. 100% with you on that one.
- username111 14y ago
  Some truth rings through the satire, like the television that appeals to the masses. Except instead of Ow my balls we have reality tv (though wipeout is pretty close to the former). There are plenty of stupid things in the movie but that doesn't mean the social commentary isn't without insight.
- tezza 14y ago
  Come on, it was just a funny movie along the lines of Dumb and Dumber, Harold & Kumar or Fletch. There was some vague sci-fi mashed up with societal critique, but really this was a pretext to get Gun toting presidents, morons and scantily clad chics on screen with a fish-out-of-water present day man.
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Hey, it’s one of my favorite dumb movies. I have no problem with it as a movie. I have a problem with people saying that it has some sort of profound message. Yeah, it satirizes current-day stupidity pretty well (and I like that) but I do not think it makes any reasonable statements about humanity’s future.

duaneb 14y ago

Nitpick, title implies people are funding malaria.

pyre 14y ago
It also means that male baldness is being funded.
- dsego 14y ago
  The original was too long, so I removed 'research'.

Shivetya 14y ago

It also means there are more chances for individuals to have the wherewithal to step in and correct the deficiencies they perceive in their life and the lives of those around them.

jlank 14y ago

It also means that some people (like Gates), that greatly succeed in a capitalist society, who has never been personally affected by Malaria (that I know of), can allocate money, awareness, and research towards a solution.

freyr 14y ago
Gates has never been personally affected by male baldness either (that I know of). I wonder if he'd make the comparison if he was one of the millions of sufferers of m.b. We need to find a cure, now.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- arrrg 14y ago
  Hey, fellow “sufferer” here. (And a young one: visibly started when I was 23/24, now I’m 25 and it’s totally obvious.) No, we do not need to find a cure. Sure, it would be nice if there were one, but that surely ranks far below curing Malaria. Baldness is a minor inconvenience. It doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t make people sick, unproductive or reduces their lifespan. Personal note: whiney bald people who act as if baldness were some sort of serious ailment are the worst. (I’m not sure whether you are serious or just joking. I have read bald people write like you, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were serious.)
- conradfr 14y ago
  Currently a bald guy manage the company he has hundreds of million of shares of.
- padraigm 14y ago
  Hormone replacement therapy stops and in some cases reverses mpb. Maybe not the solution you were looking for, though.

grantismo 14y ago

It seems like the value of a human life should be greater (than solving male baldness) in financial terms in addition to humanist terms over the long time period. Wouldn't it make more sense for Gates to make a capitalist argument for why investing in malaria research should be more profitable than investing in male baldness?

CodeCube 14y ago
But that's the problem ... it's not, or at least is very difficult to convince the average person of it. If you're a middle aged dentist in Wyoming making $127k (http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Dentist-Salary-Details-Casper-WY.aspx http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Dentist-Salary-Details-Ca...), what are you more likely to spend your money on ... large donations to malaria research, or a monthly payment to the hair club for men so you can look better and try to have an affair with the hot dental assistant? That may be a very jaded view of what the average person would do, but tell me it's wrong.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  You can't compare that. You can't compare a person spending on themself versus a person donating to a cause. Or else you'll make a suggestion that we all move to slums because it's not fair that we get to live in an actual house when not everyone can afford that.
- nightski 14y ago
  It's wrong because it makes the assumption that it is either hair club for men or malaria research. Also I don't think hair club for men = large donation to malaria research. It is far cheaper.
xyzzy123 14y ago
Sadly the capitalistic value of a life is relative and it correlates with earnings. There are public policy numbers which generally aren't talked about. In most western countries you can figure the value of a life on order of about 10 million dollars or so. Empirically, lives are valued on the high side of lifetime possible earnings, something like double the average wage * 100 years or so. Do we fix an intersection to prevent the high statistical likelihood of a death? What about a swimming pool danger PR campaign? Political swing matters more, but the dispassionate (and rational) way of doing it uses life valuation. Giving people with money hardons and a full head of hair is enormously more profitable than public spending (or charity expenditure) in poor countries. To the point where it is rational expenditure based on numbers :( Also, you can't really charge people for not getting malaria. You can try and get their government to pay for it though. I'm not saying this is right.

jerf 14y ago

It's not "capitalism", it's humanity. Governments do not magically make perfectly rational allocations of funds either. For instance, see http://www.csulb.edu/~acarter3/pdfs/carter-nguyen-BMCPublicHealth2012=cancer-funding-analysis.pdf http://www.csulb.edu/~acarter3/pdfs/carter-nguyen-BMCPublicH... for a staggeringly complete overview of the government cancer money allocation, including measurement by multiple different possible metrics. (My compliments to the chefs on that paper.)

jbooth 14y ago
Of course they don't, but then nobody argues that. You can find a ton of people who will argue that capitalism quote 'magically makes perfectly rational allocations of funds'.
- jerf 14y ago
  I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone claim that capitalism guarantees "perfectly rational" allocation of charity. More efficient charity I've seen argued, but not rationally allocated charity. If no system in use anywhere is making rational allocations, it's misleading to try to name one as the problem. (And it's the sort of misleading that leads people to solve the wrong problem, so it's not harmless, either.)
  - damoncali 14y ago
    If no system in use anywhere is making rational allocations... I would go further and say that no system can make rational allocations because definitions of 'rational' vary quite radically.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      I would go so far as to say that people who worry about the dangers of unfriendly superoptimizer intelligences need to look at the massively distributed unfriendly superoptimizer running on the abstracted meatware of human relationships and conveniently labeled "capitalism".

venus 14y ago

These two issues are nigh incomparable. One is a simple medical cure for rich first world country people. Well, not simple, but simple to sell if you've got the answer. Malaria, on the other hand, is not a product or an answer to a research problem. It's a symptom of - basically - bad government in certain parts of the world. We're not looking for a cure because there is no cure, or we're not interested in using the only cure we do know of - recolonialisation. That's the only cure which might work within 10 years. All of these issues that come under the umbrella term of "poor people problems" are of this category. They're actually bad society/government problems, and they're a devil to fix, and simply throwing money at the problem arguably just makes it worse. So we do what we can - slowly, slowly, carefully try to help them build a better society and a better class of living for their citizens. And it does seem to work, kind of, slowly.

Ygg2 14y ago
What!? Recolonisation? What a stupid thing to say. That's like solving someone's money problem by giving them cheap credits they can never return. Or solving thirst by drinking sea water. Colonisation leads to conflict, which leads to Decolonisation, which returns them back where they started only they wasted both just time and sometimes people's lives. Want to help them? Look at their native populace and find outliers (people that have least amount of malaria), then analyze what these people do that reduces their contact with malaria, and spread those methods to other people. If those methods are successful spread them, if not go back to start of paragraph. Rinse, repeat.
- venus 14y ago
  Since you speak English, you were almost certainly born in a colonised country. Yes, it can indeed go badly. And if you had thought for 10 seconds before typing your outraged reply, you can probably think of a few cases where it has gone well. Ironically, your "solution" requires either being, or having the cooperation of, the government in the affected territory, so you're actually agreeing with me.
  - Ygg2 14y ago

api 14y ago

Yes, and a casino is more profitable than a hospital, and "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, that sucks." (Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook.) Communism is dead, socialism is dead, fascism is dead, god is dead, and now market fundamentalist capitalism is dying. Of course all these things still have their True Believers, but as time goes on the ranks of those true believers dwindle and it becomes increasingly difficult to find serious and widely educated thinkers among them. This is interesting. Ideology with a capital I is a big part of how human beings model and conceptualize the world. I think what we're seeing is that our cognitive modeling capabilities have limits. Our models break down. It honestly reminds me of the trends that sweep through the computer programming world: object oriented, aspect oriented, functional, MVC, late binding, strong typing, weak typing, multiparadigm, templates, and so on... all work well for a while and then show their weaknesses. P.S. The big thing that killed market fundamentalism for me was doing a stint in business consulting and seeing what the average rich person actually is: a glorified street hustler. I was once a bit of a Randian... it was a real "the emperor has no clothes" moment. (I can think of a few rich folks who remind me of Rand heroes... a very, very, very few. I don't think I would run out of fingers. Elon Musk would be at the top of the list. Oh, but wait, his enterprises are quasi-philanthropic ventures...)

thebmax 14y ago
Capitalism also allowed Bill Gates to make $60 billion so he could donate it to finding a cure for malaria.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Far far rather have Bill Gates deciding how to spend $60 bn than Congress / Parliament. Just seems more likely to get bang per buck.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Really, as far as my personnel spending priorities go Bill Gates has wasted close to 100% of his charitable donations. Which I would not care about, however he get's a huge (multi billion dollar) tax break on donations which is simply a staggering waste of money. PS: Want to pay people to pray for world piece? That's a tax break after-all we don't actually need to repair roads and bridges or pay down debt.

mgkimsal 14y ago

It's in capitalism's interest to keep more of these people alive to sell them more stuff. Someone dying of malaria at age 7 doesn't get a chance to go bald in the first place, hence fewer sales of baldness cures.

mertd 14y ago
The bald guy in the first world makes more money in a year than the malaria kid would make in his/her lifetime.

joonix 14y ago

Yet it's capitalism that ends up financing the malaria vaccine. It just had to go through Gates first.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Well yeah. That's why you're never supposed to have pure, unalloyed capitalism, any more than you want pure and unalloyed anything. Monoculture always leads to death.

joshuahedlund 14y ago

Recently, when hearing about Gates's health initiatives along with the US discussions about tax rates, I thought that if the government had taken significantly more of Bill Gates's wealth through taxes, they probably would not have globally reduced diseases like malaria with those few billions of dollars as much as Bill Gates will with his own allocation. Not saying that's an argument against any higher tax rates, etc, but it's an interesting thought.

hereonbusiness 14y ago
Interesting thought, in 2009 the US government spent $139 billion on health research. http://www.researchamerica.org/uploads/healthdollar09.pdf http://www.researchamerica.org/uploads/healthdollar09.pdf What if most rich people do not give a damn, and just keep all their money for themselves, where would medical research be then ?

scotch_drinker 14y ago

And breast cancer gets more funding than pancreatic cancer even though pancreatic cancer kills about everyone who gets it because, you know, the boobies. As far as malaria is concerned, DDT turns out to be real effective at killing mosquitoes, the major problem in the developing world of LOTS of infectious diseases. But those of us in the developed world got more concerned with the eagles and stuff and essentially go out of our way to keep DDT from being used even though it's use in the developing world would literally save tens of thousands of human lives. The governments of the developed world did that, not capitalism. It's a grey world out there and while it's much easier to get clicks with "male baldness gets more funding than malaria so capitalism doesn't work", it's not really very helpful in actually fixing things.

speeder 14y ago
Also I would like to note that prostate cancer exist in the same amounts as breast cancer, and has much less research funding... And there are some nasty politics related to that, including prostate cancer researchers being labelled "misogynists" or "patriarchalists" just because they called our that breast cancer has more funding.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Prostate cancer is dramatically less virulent, isn't it? To the point where the medical community is starting to say early screening can be a negative thing, because loads of folks get surgery for cancer that never would've killed them?
- aroberge 14y ago
  Lots of men die of old age with prostate cancer, not because of it. Breast cancer is a far deadlier disease, one that strikes more young people, women and men (rate of incidence about 1% that of women).
- objclxt 14y ago
  It's a little more nuanced than that. 1.47% of women aged 40 will develop breast cancer within ten years, but only 0.34% of men aged 40 will develop prostate cancer over a similar time period (according to the CDC risk statistics). 0.01% of 30 year old men will develop prostate cancer within ten years, as opposed to 0.44% for women/breast cancer. That's a huge difference. One of the reasons there is more funding for breast cancer is that it often manifests itself earlier, meaning the benefits of treating it in terms of years saved is much greater.

speeder 14y ago

I know it might sound evil. But the market still does not reflect what people want? Most people don't have malaria, they don't care about malaria, and they will only care if it affects them. It is not that capitalism is evil regarding that, but why a person living in Japan for example will care if someone half planet away that have zero interaction with him will die? Now suppose that farmers that make your food are plagued with some disease... This would make your food expensive, and this would make you want to heal them, so they make your food cheap again. What happens today, is that the news about the world are faster than the economic interactions, you feel pity for people in blasted places, but you don't need them, most people don't need them, so most people won't care for them. Now tell me, if someone had asked for donations to do more research on the cancer that killed Steve Jobs, I am sure lots of people would help, not because they like Steve Jobs or because it is noble to do so, but because they like what he did. Face it, even collectivist humans are still thinking about themselves, humans either think about themselves only (the ultimate individualism) or about their immediate community. Few people care about a person with no genetic relation to you, that live half planet away, and have no economic interaction with you, either as buyer or seller.

api 14y ago
The market does excel at giving people what they want. That's not a feature. It's a bug. "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (possibly apocryphal, but probably true) Markets pander. They do not elevate. I do not want what I want. I want things that are so much better than what I want that I have not imagined them yet. Think about when you see a movie or read a book. Isn't it boring if someone's already told you the plot? You want to be surprised, and you're usually disappointed if things turned out the way you expected them to. Of course, markets do have virtues. They excel at solving multi-dimensional resource allocation problems in the short term, and they excel at taking new things and delivering them to customers. Big science bureaucracies and such are good at discovering and inventing, but they suck at shipping. The "pirates of Silicon Valley" invented little, but they shipped.
- 1123581321 14y ago
  Markets excel at giving people what they want in the long term, too. For example, the Henry Ford you quoted built a car company that became one of the most successful in the world. There is nothing about markets that prevent entrepreneurs from selling innovative products and it happens all the time. Entrepreneurs creating new things and then selling them is so common that on Hacker News, people like Steve Blank and Eric Ries have made names for themselves encouraging entrepreneurs to listen to the market even just a little bit.

protomyth 14y ago

Well, yeah. Humans are pretty poor at basic risk assessment and very tuned into their own needs. The economic system doesn't matter much, its basic human nature.

melling 14y ago

That's because consumers will allocate money to pay for baldness. That's where the money is. We all understand that, now please quit complaining and figure out how to get consumers to pay for other advances. For example, we pay for Moore's law by buying new computers and iPhones every few years. We will start paying for huge advances in robotics once they can do more of the house chores and yard work. We need to get to the tipping point. As for advances in biology and the cures for diseases, I'm not sure how to approach that. However, if we could funnel billions more from the consumer sector, we'll cure cancer, the common cold, etc. years sooner.

tjr 14y ago
When I go to Pet Smart to buy dog food, the credit card reader asks me if I want to donate $1, $5, $10, etc., to help homeless animals. I imagine that if I was at Walgreen's buying NyQuil and the credit card reader asked me if I wanted to donate $1, $5, $10, toward medical research so that people just like me can get over a cold faster in the future, I'd probably say yes.
- melling 14y ago
  You'll spend $200 for a new smartphone every few years. Samsung and Apple are fighting a war to make the better phone. Billions are spent. Likewise, Intel and ARM are competing for the future of the CPU. Someday soon, someone like iRobot will be competing with another company to automate the home. The "Apple II" of home robotics isn't too far off? The race starts then. Now find a way to commercialize companies that will also do more medical research. We do have big pharma but that research takes many years.
  - tjr 14y ago
    I don't think that people want to spend money on medicine like they want to spend money on phones. Even when they are ill, it comes across as more of a necessity than something inherently desirable, though at least when feeling ill they might give more thought to how much nicer things would be if medicines worked better than they do now. But to expect folks to cash their paychecks, run out to the store and buy some new cough syrup just because it's so cool?... that's what happens with phones, but it seems unlikely to happen with medicine. And in fact that'd be ridiculous. If one isn't even feeling ill, why should they go out and buy medicine? Unless they are buying it for someone else, but this sort of gets us into the realm of charity and donations. I don't know; what do you think? What sort of situation can you imagine in which a consumer treats funding medical research the same way they treat buying a new phone?

jevinskie 14y ago

A related story from TIME Magazine in 2008: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1828417,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1828417,00.html

hugh4life 14y ago

As someone who has just started balding, I have to cry bullshit on this. The only two medical treatments for male pattern baldness were found by accident... Minoxidil was created to treat blood pressure issues and Finasteride was created for prostate issues.

sauravc 14y ago
I'm sorry for your loss, but how does it make you an expert on how much funding is given to malaria vs male pattern balding research?
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  When billg says "if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding" is he only counting the unfruitful research into baldness, or is he also counting the blood pressure and prostate research that accidentally led to baldness treatments?

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

Capitalism used to include having to provision a private army to protect your home, and keep the caravans safe from marauders along the trade routes. Now it does not. In the future it will be more profitable to cure malaria than male pattern baldness. How do we get there? I am not sure, but having one of the most respected business figures in the world holler about it will help.

robmcm 14y ago

Easy for a man with a full head of hair to say. Or is this just a swipe at Balmer?

isleyaardvark 14y ago

>Ideally you create a business model that lets you get your margin from the rich countries and the middle income countries, or through tiering customers in developing countries." He cited eye clinics in India that offer free lens replacement and other treatments to the poor but charges those who can afford it as a good example of a tiered system. It seems like pharmaceutical companies come under a lot of fire for that kind of approach.

scythe 14y ago

I guess I get to be the guy to defend hair research. The reason this gets so much attention is that androgenic alopecia is linked to metabolic syndrome. This also means it is linked to, for example, polycystic ovary syndrome and... heart disease and diabetes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenic_alopecia#Male_homologue_to_PCOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenic_alopecia#Male_homolo... Yes, really. The fact that it's [alopecia] linked to some of the leading causes of death in the developed world might help to explain some of the research money. Of course that doesn't mean he isn't still essentially right that malaria deserves to get more money. This still, of course, reflects an implicit difference of focus between rich people and poor people. Rich people have money and they spend it on themselves, not others -- but it [the research funding] isn't just an outgrowth of simple vanity. Also, the reason we have treatments rather than cures is that the cure is horrifying. AA is caused by -- on a simple chemical level -- androgens. Read: testosterone. Finasteride et al. inhibit them. You want a cure: cut your balls off, that's the cure.

drpgq 14y ago
I wonder how much baldness research actually does go on, since the two main drugs weren't discovered by researchers working on baldness?

zosima 14y ago

Yes, this is an interesting effect of capitalism: locally significant but globally quite irrelevant issues gets more resources allocated to them than globally significant but not locally sensible investments. That's of course bad. The immediate alternative: government allocates funds to locally insignificant and because of prestige, buy-in and general politics, eventually globally worthless investments, is also not very attractive. Actually, one may see Bill Gates as an example of why capitalism is advantageous. Being allowed to amass a significant portion of wealth, he can now choose to spend it on efforts he considers good. As long as his interest is to use his money for purposes he considers the greater good, the money will certainly have a greater effect than government's spending of the same resources would. Think what you will of the Malaria problem. But I think that giving larger amounts of resources to certain individuals (just kings) is one of the most efficient ways of allocating resources. Now, the main problem with modern capitalism is this: Why do so few just kings arise from the very wealthy? Most very rich seem incapable of creating or living by any sentiment or value-system that goes beyond their own self-indulgence. Why is that? And how to make a system where the people that rise create value and values?

chii 14y ago
perhaps having a sense of morals and ethics means you end up not being as ruthless and thus less likely to earn the big bucks.

voxfrege 14y ago

This is a very narrow view. What the article should be saying is that with every dollar you do not spend for fight against deadly diseases, well, you're effectively let people die. That means, you (not capitalism), as the owner of a computer or an iPhone, value watching cat videos higher than helping people not to die. This, of course, is such a heavy moral burden that you're happy someone comes along and blames it on "capitalism".

chii 14y ago
there is no moral burden on you for not using you available wealth to help the poor. selfishness is a natural state of things. i respect and admirer people who go Wismar against their natural state to give allergically altrustically, but i will never judge someone for not wanting to donate.

bjhoops1 14y ago

The fact is that the Private Sector solves problems exclusively for people who can pay for them. In other words, how useful the Private Sector is to you is a direct function of your income. The Public Sector may be inefficient and costly, but if you don't have money, it's the only Sector that gives a shit about you. Which is why it infuriates me to see invariably affluent, educated professionals preaching the Gospel of Free Markets and Small Government to the shiftless masses, with their petty concerns like Health Insurance. Why can't they just buy anything they need? Conservative/Libertarian types like to pontificate about how the 47% will always vote for policies which take from the Randian Supermen (which they fancy themselves) to distribute to the Moochers, yet they fail to recognize how easy it is for someone with an income in the top 10% to dismiss the Social Welfare programs which they will never themselves be in need of as "wasteful spending". The Hypocrisy! In Software Development, we like to say that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The experienced developer knows that different tools have different uses, and does not get caught up in holy wars advocating for her favorite design pattern or algorithm. I wish that people would look at the public/private sector debate with that kind of maturity - the Public and Private sectors are well suited for some issues, and poorly suited for others. The question is to determine which is the better fit for a given scenario. To reflexively advocate for either Private or Public solutions in every scenario is foolish, like the undergraduate Comp Sci student who just discovered recursion and wants to solve every problem that way. Let's try to move past Ideology and on to Problem Solving.

crusso 14y ago
Which is why it infuriates me to see invariably affluent, educated professionals preaching the Gospel of Free Markets and Small Government to the shiftless masses, with their petty concerns like Health Insurance. Why can't they just buy anything they need? Your understanding of their motivations is deficient. You seem intelligent, maybe you could spend some time understanding their argument. If you do understand their argument, why misstate it? It's not so much they think, "Why can't they just buy anything they need?". It's that they (we) think, "These masterminds who lie by telling voters that they can set up this magical one-size-fits-all healthcare system and work it efficiently are just trying to grab power and votes for themselves. It's a horrible idea to set up yet another governmental dependency that is doomed to fail like all the others. Already, the system will cost triple what we were told. We have seen that 'You can keep your own insurance' was a lie. It contains numerous hidden taxes and costs. When will we ever learn?"

jskonhovd 14y ago

Capitalism is not the problem. It's our culture. We need to find a way to funnel more people into STEM jobs. The west has failed. India and China have drastically different governments but they both have been able to do one thing. Produce Engineers.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Male baldness occurs late in life - high value individuals have had a chance to accumulate wealth. Malaria hits early, before potential earnings have accumulated. Though it hits poor people, the potential lifetime excess incomes of malaria victims should rival that of males willing to spend on baldness. Thus, we have an issue of time horizons - finance knows how to solve this! A coalition of African governments could create an X Prize for a malaria cure, committing to a certain level of expenditure, e.g. 30% of the population within 10 years, for a cure or vaccine that meets certain efficacy and cost hurdles. Theoretically, taxes on the salvaged incomes would pay for the safety net - this presupposes a reasonable level of productivity. A coalition willing to levy a conditional tax on its population for when a cure meeting certain efficacy and cost hurdles becomes available should also qualify for some sort of multilateral backstop, thus increasing the probability of the "prize" being paid. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations did not speak about the economy alone, but of the political economy. Talking about capitalism absent the institutions that frame the market is vacuous. Philanthropy is a good balm, but I reject that malaria is immune to the vectors which are fighting male baldness.

natmaster 14y ago

But it also means malaria gets more funding than it would otherwise.

mikebludd 14y ago

This guy sucks the joy out of being successful. Him and the oppressor of Omaha are my least favourite bourgeios.

frogpelt 14y ago

Capitalism is what created the billions of dollars that Bill Gates has in his Gates Foundation to spend on things like curing malaria. Double-edged sword.

matterhorn 14y ago

Capitalism also means DDT, which kills mosquitoes that are vectors for malaria. However, statist intervention bans DDT and allows mosquito populations to thrive, thus killing large numbers of people in places like Gambia where...wait a minute! Places like Gambia where malaria rates are in free-fall! And why? Because of the use of insecticide treated netting...(kinda makes you wonder what kind of drop in malaria rates could be achieved through DDT, huh?) See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030203243.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030203243.ht... So, socialism and enviro-wacko statist intervention gets people killed by malaria through bans on insecticides, which turn out to be the most effective counters to malaria.

known 14y ago

I thought Gates made fortune due to Capitalism

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

What I find interesting is that malaria gets less funding because the countries with malaria are so poor. And they are poor because of their governments are bad. And if a country with malaria suddenly started to grow quickly, it itself would also quickly solve its malaria problem. So what do charities do? They fund malaria cures, not government reform. They fund the treatment of symptoms, not the root cause. And why don't we fund the root cause? It turns out it may well be much harder than curing malaria. How do you un-corrupt a thoroughly corrupt government? And Europe has a horrific colonial history with the developing world, especially Africa. First worlders attempting to dictate what and how 3rd world leaders should do would be embarrassingly reminiscent of colonialism. And here embarrassing means leader might lose the perceived power which keeps them in office. And lastly donor countries tend to have laws against corruption which would punish charities for paying off foreign leaders. Even if they are paying them off to reduce poverty or something good like that. So here is a totally crazy idea. Make an exception to foreign corruption laws if the cause is worth it. Then offer secret payment to developing world leaders if they meet certain metrics. And also offer them advice on what to do to meet the metrics. And do it all in secret. Imagine Kim Jong Un one day suddenly starts slowl and steady market reforms. Imagine 10 years later North Korea is growing quite fast, and Kim Jong Un is a dedicated fighter of corruption. Imagine Kim Jong Un himself starts to encourage direct democracy, first at village level and then higher. Imagine a few years later Kim Jong Un gives an emotional speech about the two Koreas being one, liberty and democracy in the North, and then resigns leaving a Swiss like democratically chosen group of people in charge, and a North Korean government structure looking quite similar to that of Switzerland. Then Kim Jong Un moves to southern California with a mysterious fortune of several billion dollars, a universal pardon from the US president, and protection from foreign prosecution in the states.

chii 14y ago
why would kim so all of that when he can already live it up like a King right now? having a few bil in money isnt enough to replace what he has right now, which I'd essentially evwrything in NK...

davidf18 14y ago

Read Andy Kessler's WSJ article from today. It provides an answer: Want to Change the World? How About a Billion-Dollar Prize http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323628804578348002211277908.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732362880457834... You can google for the story to get beyond the paywall if you need to.

znowi 14y ago

I really respect this guy. At the time when Apple et al stockpile their gold, he puts his money up for a noble cause.

cryptonector 14y ago

He's wrong. The lack of capitalism where malaria abounds is the reason that malaria gets little funding (assuming that's even so; I've not checked). If you want to improve the lot of people, give them capitalism. Bill Gates is a great example of the aphorism "trust capitalism, not capitalists". He's a capitalist, but he himself does not believe in capitalism. It's like the quip about Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies: "by one of its enemies". Gates lacks the authority on this subject that his success would appear to lend him. Beware!

cryptonector 14y ago

Capitalism isn't an idea, like, say, socialism. Capitalism is something that arises organically in societies that allow their citizens/residents freedom. The alternative to capitalism isn't a different economic organization. The alternative to capitalism is not-freedom. Those who say (like @api in the first post) that capitalism is dying and imply (or state) that we need an alternative, either mean to take freedom away from us, or don't know that that's what they mean.

drequivalent 14y ago

Says one of the most prominent capitalists ever-ever existed. Oh, this is the irony so hard it broke my spine.