Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

If you put aside the &quot;M$ was evil and he is just atoning&quot; arguments, Gates is a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he&#x27;s passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe inspiring.<p>I&#x27;m mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the 90&#x27;s. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee&#x27;s knees, I wanted to be as effective as Gates.

The size of the Gates Foundation is only impressive if you believe public policy should be disproportionately influenced by the whims of a few rich individuals. Philanthropists may not be motivated by profit like lobbyists, but that doesn&#x27;t mean they understand the needs of the people any better. For issues related to relatively concrete sciences like medicine this matters less. But in areas such as education for example, the role of the Gates foundation has been disastrous.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;how-the-gates-foundation-reflects-the-good-and-the-bad-of-hacker-philanthropy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;how-the-gates-foundation...</a>

Bill Gates was a tough competitor, to be sure, and you had to bring your A game when dealing with Microsoft. But the complaints that he was &#x27;evil&#x27;, when you drill down to see what the actual complaint is, just seem to fade away. Most of it seems to be simply envy.<p>See &quot;In Search of Stupidity&quot; by Chapman.<p>P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against Microsoft in programming languages.

Hey there, data geeks!<p>I am doing research on the rise of social entrepreneurship and got sidetracked by what a badass Bill Gates is. I found out that his foundation is 4x larger than the next largest private foundation in the US. And if you add up the wealth pledged as a part of The Giving Pledge it is 10x larger than that.<p>I compiled The Giving Pledge data on my own by researching net worths of each pledgee. Planning to put the data on the Wikipedia page shortly.<p>I found the other data from the following sources (see direct links in article):<p>Foundation Center The Giving Pledge NP Trust GBD Compare AVAC<p>Happy to answer any questions and would love feedback.

I was surprised to not find a comparison between those private charitable contributions and the money spent by nations all over the world on similar programs. Unless I am missing something, it would look to me like the Giving Pledge, all together, spent more money on the fight against AIDS in the last 10 years than the U.S. government did [0]. If that is true, then there are still the questions left of who spent money more efficiently, whether and which other uses of taxes are more important than the fight against AIDS, as well as the general philosophical question of whether we should allow a few individuals to control how a huge proportion of the resources of the world are used, and under which circumstances. But beyond all those delta-from-the-ideal-world questions, it is indeed a pretty huge amount of good likely being done there.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kff.org&#x2F;global-health-policy&#x2F;fact-sheet&#x2F;u-s-federal-funding-for-hivaids-the-presidents-fy-2016-budget-request&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kff.org&#x2F;global-health-policy&#x2F;fact-sheet&#x2F;u-s-federal-f...</a>

Website needs some work for mobile view:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;vlwi2hh.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;vlwi2hh.jpg</a>

More and more I feel the best data visualization for most scenario is just bar, line, and pie charts. They need no explanation and communicate information effectively.<p>Too many visualizations that are fun and fancy but convey ideas poorly.

I was expecting to see a comparison to public sector development programs in countries with bigger government.<p>For example USA does only 0.22% of GNI in foreign aid compared to the 0.7% target and 0.3-0.5% realized in its cohort of industrialized countries. (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unmillenniumproject.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;07.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unmillenniumproject.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;07.htm</a>)

Don&#x27;t you find very suspicous that since the past year, we get regularly those stories comming up in reddit, imgur, hacker news, etc ?<p>Think about it: there are a ton of nice people doing nice things around. Even tech people. But you hear only about Bill.<p>The Gate Foundation existed for a long time. It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before reaching me, BTW), and we didn&#x27;t have this incredible &quot;yeah, best man ever&quot; crazy minset going around.<p>It smells a lot like well done PR, with a lot of money behind to give a better image of the man, targetting social networks by subtils channels.<p>And if you need PR and pays to much for it, you probably DON&#x27;T deserve the praises.

I was just pondering Gate&#x27;s legacy the other day. While I was blowing away another copy of Windows that I paid for but never booted.

i&#x27;m curious as to whether it is more effective for an individual to hold a contribute-as-you go style to philantrophy vs a make-money-first-then-donate strategy like gates did. Given that most people aren&#x27;t going to be billionaires, I would guess the former but maybe someone who has looked at the data can provide some insight.

Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ...<p>1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits.<p>2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services like education and healthcare. In the USA, they&#x27;re not - the capital gains rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century.<p>3) Foundations work very well for tax planning. Who knows what their efficiency is as charity?

I&#x27;d request Gates to contribute to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Millennium_Development_Goals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Millennium_Development_Goals</a>