Bill Gates, som alla vet, har väldigt mycket pengar. För att ge bort en del av dem, så har Bill Gates skapat en stiftelse som ger bort pengar till olika ändamål. Hans stifte, som har han tillsammans med sin fru, heter Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Förra veckan var Bill Gates på universitet Berkeley i Californien för att hålla ett föredrag. Föredraget innehöll en frågestund och där kommer några frågor upp om den här filantropiska(*) verksamheten. Dessa tycker jag är intressant, därför vill jag återge dem här. Hela avskriften av presentationen finns här.
of what do you pick, because the needs in the world are so broad and even
with the scale of dollars that I'm lucky enough to have where my wealth is
going back to society, it's still very necessary to pick because the scale of
the problems and in comparison to government budgets it's not that much.
So the key thing for me was saying, where is there a market failure? For
example, in medicine I don't do philanthropy for rich-world diseases. That's
not to say I don't think that heart disease or cancer or Parkinson's,
whatever diseases that are a real problem in this country, there shouldn't be
research on that. But I feel like between the government dollars here that go
for that and the pharmaceutical research dollars, which is about 60 billion a
year, they are addressing that problem and so the market is working and that
my contribution to that wouldn't be that significant.
Whereas if you take developing country diseases, take malaria, when I gave my
first $50 million to malaria, people said, wow, that doubled the amount of
private money going to malaria. Well, this is a disease that kills a million
people a year. This is a disease that right this minute 200 million people
are suffering from. It's way worse than any rich-world disease and yet .1
percent of medical R&D goes against malaria. And, in fact, the biological
techniques we have, making vaccines, making drugs, this is a very probable
thing. In fact, there's a collaboration here at this university to use some
amazing synthetic chemistry approaches to actually make malaria medicines.
So I pick things that I thought weren't being done, and I was stunned to find
that most of the research money in medicine, 95 percent goes on 5 percent of
the disease burden, and 5 percent of the money goes on 95 percent of the
burden, so I tried to pick something that just wasn't being addressed, so
that's gone very well in terms of getting a critical mass of smart people to
work on those things.
So the Foundation picked really two things, what I think is the biggest
challenge in this country, which is education, scholarships, those things,
and what's the biggest problem globally, which is the inequity in terms of
living conditions, particularly health.
[...]
Well, I hope and I think that my philanthropic work has made me
smarter in my business work. I can say it's probably even stronger the other
way around; that is, I spent most of my career doing my job at Microsoft and
I even used to say that I would wait until I was in my sixties and basically
retired from my Microsoft job before I did any philanthropy because I wanted
to take time to figure out what things to do.
And it was about -- well, about 12 years ago now when I was reading about
population growth and diseases and I started to get into putting computers in
libraries that I said, no, I've got to break -- I'm not going to be able to
have this partitioned life where I do make money for these years and then I
do this giving away money thing later. I thought it would be kind of
schizophrenic that you have one day where you go into work in the morning and
you're saying let's make money and then in the afternoon you're saying no,
no, no, let's give it away. (Laughter.) I thought my discipline might get
messed up or something, but I don't think that's been a problem.
The one thing that's great on the nonprofit side is you feel you're part of
something bigger than yourself, you've got this sense of excitement there
that everybody is involved with that you're part of. And I think even in the
commercial world, that's very, very important when people think about their
job, it's not just an economic bargain. If you're going to draw the best out
of those people, the notion of -- really, take at Microsoft, we go and show
the employees how the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of software we've
given to libraries are being used; we take, for example our accessibility
work, where handicapped people, because we do special things in the software,
can use the computers in a better way, we get then to meet some of those
people and understand, OK, what are the unmet needs where we can do that
better.
And so I think having a sense of cause, a sense of purpose about why work is
important, that's something where you see it best in the nonprofit world
because they couldn't survive without it, but you learn how to do that even
better in the business world.
Summa sumarium: Alla vi som har köpt någon Microsoftprodukt har hjälpt till att att bota Malarian i världen.
(*) Ordförklaring: filantropi´ (grek. philanthrapi´a 'människokärlek', av phi´los 'vän' och a´nthrapos 'människa'), verksamhet som syftar till att osjälviskt hjälpa människor som är i nöd. (Källa Nationalencyklopedin)
>> Summa sumarium: Alla vi som har köpt någon Microsoftprodukt har hjälpt till att
>> bota Malarian i världen.
Oink. Icke sant. Alla som köpt en Microsoftprodukt har bidragit till forskning om Malaria.
Alla som köpt en Microsoftprodukt har bidragit till ett mer korkat patentklimat. Vilket verkligen sänker U-länder.
/Bengan
Posted by: bengan | 2004-10-13 at 15.47