Bill Gates Calls for a 'Kinder Capitalism'

Strudelkugel writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates is going to call for a revision of capitalism. He will argue that the economics that drive much of the world should use market forces to address the needs of poor countries, which he feels are currently being ignored. 'We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,' Mr. Gates will say in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 'Key to Mr. Gates's plan will be for businesses to dedicate their top people to poor issues — an approach he feels is more powerful than traditional corporate donations and volunteer work. Governments should set policies and disburse funds to create financial incentives for businesses to improve the lives of the poor, he plans to say. Mr. Gates's argument for the potential profitability of serving the poor is certain to raise skepticism, and some people may point out that poverty became a priority for Mr. Gates only after he'd earned billions building up Microsoft. But Mr. Gates is emphatic that he's not calling for a fundamental change in how capitalism works.'"

World Bank Loan Sharks

[ThoreauHD]

The World Bank and IMF loan these countries money, which is then paid out to contractors specified by the WTO. These contractors then give a piece to local officials and do nothing. Where you now have a 3rd world country with a 4 Billion dollar loan at 30% with nothing to show for it. Which means that they borrow another 4 Billion to actually do the work they paid for the first time, and the cycle continues. Unless Bill Gates controls the world bank, he's going to have to find another hobby. You can't save the poor on this planet. The rich own them.

The end of poverty

[Antity-H]

Jeffrey sachs a famous american economist who was for a time special advisor to UN secretary general Kofi Annan wrote a book published in 2005 titled "The end of poverty" where he details just such a revision. see http://www.amazon.com/End-Poverty-Jeffrey-Sachs/dp/0141018666/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201185744&sr=11-1 [amazon.com]

this is not as ironic or impossible as it sounds at first sight, Sachs is not a dreamer, what he wants to achieve is not suppressing all of poverty, but to suppress life threatening poverty. To do this he proposes to help the poor countries get back on the development ladder by using slight modifications to the market forces. once they get on the development ladder he argues, extreme poverty should disappear pretty fast (his proposed time frame is 20 years )

Soweto

[BeanThere]

He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto

Having been there myself several times last year (it's not too far from where I live), I wouldn't really call Soweto a failure of capitalism. It arose primarily under the old apartheid system as a collection of around 30 "black townships" (roughly = "black ghettos"), and the system for the blacks was basically an oppressive fascist police state, while for the whites, at best socialist (e.g. major industries like telecomms, electricity, television broadcasting, steel etc. were nationalised and quite tightly controlled). The Group Areas Act of old also forced certain races to live in certain areas, and other apartheid regulations specifically DID NOT ALLOW much freedom of trade or other commercial activity within black areas like Soweto - the blacks weren't really allowed to just, say, up and build a mall, noone was. That's not capitalism. That was just 14 or 15 years ago, basically.

Now, the current government is still a 'socialist' government - when the old government fell in 1994, the new one implemented a variety of "reforms" such as minimum wage and various welfare grants and "free electricity and water for all" programs, all of which did not exist before, that are certainly far more, um, typically associated with socialism than capitalism. On the other hand they reduced the level of nationalisation of businesses, privating or semi-privatising a number of major industries for example (some of those are disasters but for complete other reasons not relevant to this topic - also not failures of capitalism though). Nonetheless the current government can best be described as "centrist", pushing things neither too far to the right nor left - it is, loosely speaking, a 'free market system for most markets but with some socialist characteristics and a bit of crony capitalism' (not unlike the US), but has only been so for 14 odd years. For Soweto, many of the zoning and movement regulations have been lifted, which means that people and companies are now more free to invest and build etc. in Soweto, and anyone, including blacks are free to start, own, run and trade in any businesses. In spite of the relative poverty, with an estimated population between 1,000,000 and 4,000,000 people (who as a result of the old zoning regs used to have to travel miles to Joburg to buy various stuff), Soweto has a combined estimated annual retail buying power of about 4 billion Rand (roughly US$500million), and this IS currently attracting a lot of investment and development, particularly by the major black 'business elite' that has risen since 1994 --- there is currently loads of development going on - new malls are springing up, office parks are going up, gyms, even hotels and basic broadband infrastructure etc. are being built in Soweto.

So I wouldn't really call this a failure either - it's just the beginning, after all, just 14 years into a semi-capitalist system with mostly poor and poorly educated people, it's starting to turn into a veritable growing metropolis / city in its own right (albeit a dangerous crime-ridden one). Of course it could be going a lot better, but I don't think it can rightfully be called a "failure of capitalism". More like, new-born capitalism is starting to help fix the wreck of a socialist police state.

It should be noted that Soweto is NOT considered one of the "poorer" township areas. It's definitely poor, but compared to most other 'black townships', comparatively wealthy (e.g. almost all houses are brick - small and rundown, but brick, many roads are tarred etc., many streets have lighting and painted lines and there are proper police stations and hospitals and electricity and phone infrastructure - unlike the real poor, 'hardcore' townships like Umlazi and Alexandra which are really thousands of little shacks.)

Re:Really Bill?

[Tranzistors]

Remember that socialism works quite well in Sweden (that pirate country everybody is talking about).
And communism has never been implemented (soviet union had socialism). I have heard of a tribe or something in Israel that works that way, but I don't have my facts with me.

Re:Eliminate Copyrights and Patents

[crmarvin42]

these days its the smaller gene- or bio-labs that come up with new ways to kill the most common threat to out bodies, not big pharma.

This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Smaller labs may make interesting discoveries, but how do they get those discoveries to market considering the cost of FDA approval. Smaller labs may on occasion make breakthroughs, but they usually end up either selling the idea/technology to big pharma or end up getting bought up themselves so that it can be further developed. No small independent lab can afford to perform the various levels of animal and human testing required for approval without already having a product that is bringing in money. This is where Big Pharma comes in. They have a portfolio of products actively bringing in revenue that can be used to pay the R&D bills. Now, I'm not saying that Big Pharma doesn't gouge american consumers because of the way our health care industry is set up, but that doesn't mean they aren't necessary. It's the fact that they are absolutely required that they are able to demand we all bend over and take it like a man.

Re:Soweto

[BeanThere]

A few other odds and ends that may or may not be interesting to some:

A small part of Soweto [google.com] in Google Maps. (Soweto's very big and sprawling; this section shows Chris-Hani Baragwanath Hospital in the bottom right - a huge state-run hospital, some sources claim it's the biggest hospital in the world, although that's a claim I'd say "[citation needed]" for myself). To the top left is a now decommissioned power plant, the two towers of which dominate a large area of the Soweto skyline (and now painted with murals), I think the plant's now being converted into offices or something. A little bit further in the 'top right' direction you'll see some huge mine dumps which prominently lie between Soweto and Johannesburg, from Joburg's 'mining heydays' when much of the world's gold came from here. (Trees and plants don't grow properly on them, due to some or other important mineral that is missing from the mining process, so they look quite bare; IIRC they have to be specially treated to get stuff to grow on them.)

For those not too familiar with Africa's geography, Soweto is in South Africa, the same country that the founder of Ubuntu (Mark Shuttleworth) is from.

Nelson Mandela had a house in Soweto, it's now a big tourist attraction; I think Google Earth pinpoints it. There are several other major tourist spots, such as the Hector Pieterson memorial (named for the first victim when police shot at protesting schoolchildren, triggering the 1976 Soweto Uprising).

Traffic is hell getting in and out, especially at rush hour; the province (Gauteng, which actually means 'place of Gold' in a local African language) is, more or less, a vibrant industrial economic area accounting for between 25% and 39% of Africa's GDP.

It's an interesting place with an amazing vibe, but it's not for everyone, and not for the meek (um, I briefly had a gf in Soweto, that's why I know too much about it - something else that was illegal in the old South Africa, under the so-called "Morality Act" IIRC ;).

Re:Great News...

[Daengbo]

Well, Bill Gates is on the record (1995) for deriding other CEOs as having only "finite greed [nytimes.com]" and not being competitive enough by moving into new markets. Odd that he would call for "kinder capitalism."

Re:Great News...

[cromar]

Apple has (in the early days you actually had to get a token) kept very tight control on who can develop on the Apple box. And third parties have to be "blessed" and pay homage to the alter of Steve Jobs.

Oh come on. XCode (Apple's IDE) and a slew of other developer tools come with every copy of OS X. Even back in the olden times of SEs and Quadras, there were numerous IDEs available from Borland (C/C++/Pascal), there was MPW, RealBASIC, FutureBASIC, etc. There really was no blessing involved that I can recall. Apple has always needed more developers on the Mac... it would go against logic to make it hard for them to enter the arena (especially in the mid-early years of Mac, Appple didn't really make much software for the platform - it was mostly third party software). Hell, going back to the Apple ][, which came with a BASIC interpreter, there was a widely distributed public domain Pascal compiler, not to mention tons and tons of third party software.

Yunus

[wsanders]

Minor spelling flame, just so people can get their Googles headed in the right direction. "Yukos" is the defunct Russian oil company stolen by Putin.

And yes Gates and Yunus have been doing the rounds of the surf'n'turf hi tech conferences lately.

Yunus, not Yukos

[Anonymous Coward]

Its Muhammad 'Yunus' , the 2006 Noble Peace Prize winning economist/entrepreneur from Bangladesh.