Putting Bill Gates on the Spot
In the tenth annual letter about the state of their foundation released earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates answered “ten tough questions” they are commonly asked about their philanthropy. The Gateses are honest and cheerful in their responses, and the letter reveals more about their critics than it does about them.
“Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?” they are asked. Whether you agree with its methods or not, the Gates Foundation underwrites undeniably worthwhile causes that most liberals would support. The Gateses want to end malaria and HIV, get poor kids a better chance at a good education, and empower women around the globe to provide for their families. But if you don’t tick off every liberal cause, then you are not really committed to change, apparently. Why not global warming too? (What about nuclear disarmament and saving the whales?) Gates responds by pointing out, reasonably, “in philanthropy, you look for problems that can’t be fixed by the market or governments. The clean-energy problem can be fixed by both.” But this is unlikely to assuage critics who believes that the market is the problem, and philanthropy is just there to help government.
That leads the critics to another important question: “Why do you work with corporations?” Bill Gates replies, “we think poor people should benefit from the same kind of innovation in health and agriculture that has improved life in the richest parts of the world. Much of that innovation comes out of the private sector.” What does it say about the folks asking these questions that they need Bill Gates to explain that corporations make money by creating products that the rest of us find useful, and which make life better for people?
The critics are not satisfied simply with the improvement of life for the world’s most poor and desperate; they also want to see those at the top taken down a notch or two. “Is it fair that you have so much influence?” the Gateses are queried. “No,” they answer, but they have too much tact to tell the questioners that “fairness” in itself is not the goal of philanthropy. The Gateses note, however, that this question about fairness implies another question: “If we think it’s unfair that we have so much wealth, why don’t we give it all to the government?” And here they say that, unlike government, foundations can “take a long-term approach to solving problems, and manage high-risk projects that governments can’t take on and corporations won’t.”
The Gates Foundation is hardly a hotbed for funding conservative ideas. Indeed, many on the right have objected to their education efforts—which include backing the Common Core—as well as their efforts to distribute contraception more widely in the developing world. But the questions that the Gateses say that they are most frequently asked all seem to come from the Left. Perhaps conservatives assume that Bill Gates made his own money and that he will fund whatever he wants to with it. Leftists, on the other hand, assume no such thing. And no matter how consistent the Gates Foundation’s efforts are with the liberal agenda, they don’t go far enough.
In another example of this tendency, the critics ask, “Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation?” Is this a serious question? It appears that we are now at a point where a foundation actually has to justify efforts to save the lives of suffering children. Though Bill and Melinda Gates respond that when children are more likely to survive into adulthood, parents have smaller families, they also note, “saving the lives of children is its own justification.” Who knows whether their critics will agree with this controversial statement?
The Gateses are ultimately optimists. “The world,” they write, “is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.”
For those caught in an elite bubble, where the only news is about impending disaster at home and abroad, Bill Gates’s upbeat attitude will come as a shock. Whether you agree with his methods or specific goals, Gates seeks incremental improvement via medical research and education, to improve the standard of living and quality of life for more people, rather than transforming the world in a great political or ideological leap forward, which is what the Left seeks. But between them, Gates is far more likely to “save the world,” or at least improve it.
