Bill Gates Calls for a 'Kinder Capitalism' 601
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.'"
Eliminate Copyrights and Patents (Score:1, Interesting)
It sounds like Gates is reading Yukos (Score:5, Interesting)
Mohammed Yukos has been evangelizing a number of ideas about entrepreneurial businesses whose primary motive is helping their communities, and who only make enough "profit" to build their businesses and help more people. If this means that Gates is buying into those ideas, with Gates's resources, and the commitment to philanthropy he's always shown (outside his day job as the Satanic Overlord of the information economy, obviously), this might lead to good things.
Doesn't mean I'll be buying a copy of Windows any time soon, of course; and I'd still like to see the DOJ actually investigate some of Microsoft's shenanigans, but give the man credit where it's due.
Re:Really Bill? (Score:1, Interesting)
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes
spread a lively terror
Nice hero.
World's Billionares (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Eliminate Copyrights and Patents (Score:3, Interesting)
The only types of infections that could wipe us all out aren't likely to be treatable with the sort of drugs that big pharma is interested in patenting - the anti-obesity, anti-cancer, antidepressant and other sorts of anti-whatever-social-disorder-is-trendy drugs.
It's likely to be a viral infection of the influenza type, for which the technology to create an effective vaccine already exists, and for which no lengthy clinical trials are needed.
There will always be a market for such vaccines with or without patents, so your FUD is badly aimed in this case.
Re:Great News... (Score:3, Interesting)
People tend to group things illogically. Separate the two, because in reality they are separate.
Re:I think I know what he wants (Score:1, Interesting)
"I think charity should firmly be in the hands of a gover(n)ment" - business can always do more and move faster than any government can. Charity should be in the hands of whomever can do it and want to do it. If you want our government to step up, maybe they'll step up as much as they do for Darfur? Then we'll really see some results out there.
"MS product catalog seems awfully thin" - apparently you are unaware of the number of industries they are attached to. Software for portable devices, cell phones, televisions, gaming consoles, super markets, automobiles, media, video compression, military, music, hardware, office software, robotics, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
MS is not some satanic company like you make them out to be. Did they innovate and give us a LOT of what we use today, yes. Did they do some 'dirty business' to stay alive and get a foot in the door - yes they did, get over it and move on, their way of doing business today is a lot better than it's been in the past.
Bill has gotten older, he's gotten married, and started a family. Those things always put life into a different perspective (especially kids). Over the past few years, he's gone from working a lot at MS to doing a lot more charity work (his dealings with Warren Buffet also pushed him in that direction). And with any innovators/strong business men, when you start to do something you see ways you feel you can improve the process for what you are doing. In dealing with charity, I'm sure he say ways to improve what he wanted to do and start working on it. A very similar approach Bill Clinton has been taken in dealing with his more charitable work in the past few years.
"MS has made it an art to find way to dodge paying taxes over its gigantic earnings." - um, wake up and smell reality - every and any business (and person) tries their best to avoid taxes. I'm sure you never try to milk anything extra for your tax refund ("No sir! I want to pay the most taxes possible, write off nothing!!!") - Plus paying taxes in a perfect world would go to good things, instead your tax money will go to other big businesses, tobacco companies, oil companies, etc.
"If he is truly that worried about society, the answer is simple, PAY MORE TAXES." - wow, ya, that'll fix all our problems, flushing money down the government toilet...
"There are some fans of Bill Gates who point out his charity work, but frankly for a man that is that rich, it is pathetic..."
no amount of charity is pathetic - no matter how big or how small, people that complain about other people giving time and money to the poor is pathetic. that's not a flame, that's the truth. grow up.
actually (Score:3, Interesting)
The ideal Marxist state, however, has never been implemented. Though the Soviet Union was founded in the spirit of Marx's work, it was by no means the kind of state that Marx thought would necessarily appear. Marx's worker's state required an industrialized economy to arise (since this foster development of class consciousness among the proletariat), and there's no way you can fairly say that Russia was an industrial economy in 1917.
None of this is to endorse Marx's theories or the desirability of a Marxist state, merely to point out that one of his key stipulations didn't actually obtain in Russia at the time of the revolution.
Re:I can rationalize with Bill a bit.. (Score:1, Interesting)
If Bill Gates hadn't used the government to artificially create a visa program (H1B) then the normal market forces would have worked: wages would have risen faster for engineers, which would have encouraged more US students to enter the software engineering market, which would have eventually stabilized wages. Also it would have encouraged foreign software companies to invest in competing domestic products in places like India, which would have raised the standards of living in places like India. Because the cost of business in the US would have increased which would have slowed down Microsoft's growth in the short term....oh and there it is. Bill Gates was afraid of letting countries in Africa and India and eastern Europe compete. So he changed the laws in the US so he could hire away from those places their best people to work for him thereby making it impossible for those countries to compete.
Microsoft using the government to manipulate markets in a command economy way. If anything Bill Gates hates capitalism. Bill Gates hates free markets. Bill Gates is really more of a communist than anything. A free market person would NEVER have the government step into the labor market. It is really that simple.
Re:The end of poverty (Score:5, Interesting)
In short it reads more like an adverticing for himself and the UN system.
If your are interested in ending poverty I will suggest you read
The Future of Money by B.A. Lietaer
Re:It sounds like Gates is reading Yukos (Score:3, Interesting)
First, it's Muhammand Yunus, not Yukos. He was never AFAICT connected with a defunct Russian oil producer. ;)
The concept of "sustainable enterprise" is starting to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas, if only because the alternatives [wikipedia.org] are rather unappealing. The sound-bite version of this idea is that, if the poorer 5/6-ths of the world's population became entrepreneurial, and found better, cheaper ways to use our limited supply of natural resources, those of us at the top of the pyramid would also benefit. In this respect, capitalism (as we know it at least) would seek to do good and do well at the same time. (Another famous proponent of this approach is Professor C. K. Prahalad [wikipedia.org].)
Pure free-market theorists despise this idea, as most believe that only self-interest should govern economic decisions in order to maximize the greater good. This view, however, fails in practice, since it cannot account for information asymetry (where all "players" don't have equal access to all information about the "game"), let alone the wildly unequal access to capital among the world's populations.
Shamless karma-burning plug time: Check out this site [unc.edu] for more info. (Yes, I'm a Kenan-Flagler alum. Go Heels.)
Re:Great News... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Really Bill? (Score:5, Interesting)
#2: Norway
#6: Sweden
#12: United States
Democratic socialist Scandinavian countries -- where people live in abject squalor and poverty due to the evil scurge of socialism...
Re:Great News... (Score:5, Interesting)
2) He kept an incredible amount of wealth for himself (see 1)
3) He's killed the market for third parties. Many companies have failed to get funding once MS announced they were making one too. Then never made it.
5) He's brought the price of software HUGELY up. Before MS, there was no economy of scale, so comparing enduser costs between the two completely different realms is ridiculous.
Re:Great News... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't believe I'm actually defending Bill Gates here, but that was 13 years ago, and if you read the article he does talk about how he started out being unaware of the realities of the world, and has been learning as the years have gone by, and is still learning. People do evolve, you know. I'd say, considering how low down on the "decent person" scale he started, he's actually come a really long way (but still has very far to go).
Such anger (Score:1, Interesting)
As for looking gift horses in the mouth, what would you say to a nice crack-laced bag of candy for your 2-year old? it's just someone donating candy, right? What do you have to complain about?
You got more candy than you had before, and more money left in your pocket. No harm done, right ?
Things aren't as black-and-white as you pretend, and slashdotters aren't a collective personality either.
Oh, and less you forget, it IS illegally obtained cash, as evidenced by the CRIMINAL conviction of Microsoft, master-in-chief at the helm, his Wonderful Giving Self, Lord William Gates.
Re:More gibberish (Score:3, Interesting)
- Needs. It doesn't matter if you can easily fill those needs or not.
- Trade. Some sort of means to exchange economic goods and services.
- Comparative advantage [wikipedia.org]. There are goods and services that it makes sense for someone else to provide even if you can do every task better and cheaper than anyone else.
- Existence of capital. Some goods or services require infrastructure in order to be provided.
- Private ownership of capital. It is possible for someone to own this infrastructure.
There you go. That is capitalism. To be blunt, there's no current economic system that revolves around people providing valuable economic services to avoid starvation, poverty, or worse. There used to be, Nazi Germany comes to mind, the Congo Free State, and the Communist countries of the 20th century.Education, Jobs,Clean Water. Not blind foreign aid (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the most effective way to really combat poverty? Building schools like the Central Asia Institute (http://www.ikat.org/ [ikat.org]) does for only around $12K per school, or helping developed world lenders (like me) support entrepreneurs who want to open or run their own businesses (help themselves) like Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/ [kiva.org]) does is the best way to combat real poverty. Education, jobs and drinking water is the best way. Educated young people are less likely to be recruited by extremists as well.
Sending truckloads of rice is a temporary bandaid that's not even guaranteed to get to the hands of the needy.
Hell, Kiva has more people in countries like USA and Canada who want to help, but Kiva is small and can't scale up fast enough to get to enough needy people to take advantage of all the interested donors/lenders. Government money that ends up in the hands of rebel groups could be better spent here. There is a business case to be made as well since Kiva for example is looking into passing interest back to the lenders.
Next steps can be to help bring medical skills and sustainable agriculture to a region - something that building schools can help solve.
Anyway, the current model of foreign aid is waaay broken. Fix the root of the problem like lack of education, rather than trying to fix a collapsing damn with your finger tip in the hole.
(This post is kind of all over the place, but philanthropy issues have recently become something of a passion, and I can't write prettily just now.)
Re:More gibberish (Score:4, Interesting)
This view is one which is rarely expressed nowadays,
I agree.
yet, usually the less it is heard of, the more true it is.
I disagree. Your post is mindless drivel based on a loose and ungrounded interpretation of world events. `Poverty' is a necessity for capitalism only in the sense that not everyone may posess the same amount of wealth. But if you compare the poverty level in a developed nation like the United States versus a developing nation like China, you'll see why you should be qualifying a lot of the statements you just made. I've been to China within the last ten years. I've seen what they call `poverty.' Think going outside, peeling bark off a tree, and boiling it for food. The beggars on the street here where I live in Texas make above minimum wage.
Re:Really Bill? (Score:3, Interesting)
In Denmark young people are moving to escape the tax system:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/05/business/labor.php [iht.com]
Oh if you do go and look you'll see all those people riding backs...not because they want to stay in shape, because they can't afford a car. Would you really want to live in a country where you had to pay 300,000 dollars for a BMW 3 series? I guess you could pay 30,000 grand for a new Kia....
The unemployment rate in Sweden is supposed to be as high as 20%
http://truckandbarter.com/mt/archives/000589.html [truckandbarter.com]
Because everything is so heavily taxed - forget the fact that college is free - everything is so expensive students have to take out loans anyway.
Oh then there is the gas tax. They pay 9 - 10 dollars a gallon. Yep 7 dollars a gallon in taxes for gas. Not for any environmental reasons
http://americanindk.blogspot.com/2007/08/gas-prices.html [blogspot.com]
Then there is health care....the wonderful system where you have to wait. Yep you really do. It's not a myth. Oh and you don't get a choice of doctor either. You pretty much get whoever the government decides. Unless of course you one of the few rich people and can afford extra insurance - and then you get better care.
Vets suck there too. My friend has had too dogs killed by vet ineptness. She is lucky because she can go to the police vet sometimes, but most of the time she is stuck with idiots. She can't always go the him though because he travels around the country and to Germany to help people
Yep its great there. No choice, high taxes, dead pets, everything is really expensive...