Bill Gates wil creatief kapitalisme

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De naïeve filantroop B. Gates wil een humaner en "creatiever"
kapitalisme om de derde wereld tegemoet te komen, aldus het onderstaand
artikel van WSJ. Hoe dan? Gewoon volgens de theorie van Adam Smith "The
Wealth of Nations" en nieuwe bedrijven opzetten die goederen en diensten
voor arme sloebers produceren met *winstoogmerk*.
Briljant. Hulde. Het wachten is op een gironummer waar u kunt doneren
ten gunste van de Gates Foundation.


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Bill Gates Issues Call
For Kinder Capitalism
Famously Competitive,
Billionaire Now Urges
Business to Aid the Poor
By ROBERT A. GUTH
January 24, 2008; Page A1

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But today, the Microsoft
Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the
software tycoon plans to call for a "creative capitalism" that uses
market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are 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 tell world
leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall
Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn't abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic
system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft
office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient
with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings
first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum
of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and
poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that
propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

In particular, he said, he's troubled that advances in technology,
health care and education tend to help the rich and bypass the poor.
"The rate of improvement for the third that is better off is pretty
rapid," he said. "The part that's unsatisfactory is for the bottom third
-- two billion of six billion."

Three weeks ago, on a flight home from a New Zealand vacation, Mr. Gates
took out a yellow pad of paper and listed ideas about why capitalism,
while so good for so many, is failing much of the world. He refined
those thoughts into the speech he will give today at the annual Davos
conference of world leaders in business, politics and nonprofit
organizations.

Among the fixes he plans to call for: Companies should create businesses
that focus on building products and services for the poor. "Such a
system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving
lives for those who don't fully benefit from market forces," he plans to
say.

Mr. Gates's Davos speech offers some insight into his goals as he
prepares to retire in June from full-time work at Microsoft -- where he
will remain chairman -- and focus on his philanthropy, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr. Gates sees a role for himself spurring companies into action, he
said in the interview. "The idea that you encourage companies to take
their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy -- even beyond
the market opportunities -- that's something that appropriately ought to
be done," he said.

His thoughts on philanthropy are closely heeded because of the business
success that made Mr. Gates one of the world's richest men. His
eight-year-old charity is expanding rapidly following the 2006 decision
by Warren Buffett to leave his fortune to the foundation. That donation,
at the time valued at about $31 billion, increases to some $70 billion
the hoard Mr. Gates says will be given away within 50 years of the
deaths of him and his wife.

Serving the Poor

But Mr. Gates's argument for the potential profitability of serving the
poor is certain to raise skepticism. "There's a lot of people at the
bottom of the pyramid but the size of the transactions is so small it is
not worth it for private business most of the time," says William
Easterly, a New York University professor and former World Bank economist.

Others may point out that poverty became a priority for Mr. Gates only
after he'd earned billions building Microsoft into a global giant.

Mr. Gates acknowledges that Microsoft early on was hardly a charity. "We
weren't focused on the needs of the neediest," he said, "although
low-cost personal computing certainly is a tool for drug discovery and
things that have had this very pervasive effect, including the rise of
the Internet," he said.

Although Microsoft has had an active philanthropic arm for two decades,
only in 2006 did it start seriously experimenting with software in
poorer counties in ways that would fit Mr. Gates's creative capitalism
idea. Under that 2006 program, handled by about 180 Microsoft employees,
the company offers stripped-down software and alternative ways of paying
for PCs to poorer countries.

With today's speech, Mr. Gates adds his high-profile name to the ranks
of those who argue that unfettered capitalism can't solve broad social
problems. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006
Nobel Peace Prize for his work providing small loans to the poor, is
traversing the U.S. this month promoting a new book that calls
capitalism "half developed" because it focuses only on the
profit-oriented side of human nature, not on the satisfaction derived
from helping others.

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 today. "If
we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches
that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for
business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the
world," Mr. Gates plans to say.

In the interview, Mr. Gates was emphatic that he's not calling for a
fundamental change in how capitalism works. He cited Adam Smith, whose
treatise, "The Wealth of Nations," lays out the rationale for the
self-interest that drives capitalism and companies like Microsoft. That
shouldn't change, "one iota," Mr. Gates said.

But there's more to Adam Smith, he added. "This was written before
'Wealth of Nations,'" Mr. Gates said, flipping through a copy of Adam
Smith's 1759 book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." It argues that
humans gain pleasure from taking an interest in the "fortunes of
others." Mr. Gates will quote from that book in his speech today.

Talk of "moral sentiments" may seem surprising from a man whose
competitive drive is so fierce that it drew legal challenges from
antitrust authorities. But Mr. Gates said his thinking about capitalism
has been evolving for years. He outlined part of his evolution from
software titan to philanthropist in a speech last June to Harvard's
graduating class, recounting how when he left Harvard in 1975 he knew
little of the inequities in the world. A range of experiences including
trips to Africa and India have helped raise that awareness.

In the Harvard speech, Mr. Gates floated the idea of "creative
capitalism." But at the time he had only a "fuzzy" sense of what he
meant. To clarify his thinking, he decided to prepare the Davos speech.

On Jan. 1, following a family vacation, Mr. Gates boarded a commercial
flight in Auckland, New Zealand, and during the 21-hour, two-layover
journey back to Seattle he started writing his speech.

The Sword Swallower

He drew from influences ranging from the leading thinkers on capitalism
and a sword-swallowing Swedish health expert to Norman Borlaug, the
plant pathologist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the
Green Revolution that boosted food production. A long talk with his
wife, Melinda, in the first week of January also helped shape the
speech, said Mr. Gates.

In setting up his foundation in 2000, Mr. Gates understood that
widespread criticism existed of programs to help the poor. U.S. aid had
often been motivated by broader Cold War goals and often had failed to
advance living conditions for the world's poor. Successful programs,
such as the Green Revolution, were overshadowed by growing awareness of
their negative side effects on the environment and local cultures.

Meanwhile, companies including Microsoft had donated huge amounts of
cash and products to developing countries without seeking to create
sustainable growth. Free Microsoft software in some countries spawned
broad usage of computers, while in "other places you announce a big free
software grant, come back a few years later, nothing," Mr. Gates said.

His growing awareness of such limits sparked new ideas on how businesses
could approach poor countries. At a dinner near Seattle in 2004, Mr.
Gates met one of the leading thinkers on that front, C.K. Prahalad, a
University of Michigan professor who had written "The Fortune at the
Bottom of the Pyramid." In that article and a subsequent book by the
same title, Mr. Prahalad proposed that the world's four billion poorest
people represented a huge market for companies willing to try.

Other books influencing Mr. Gates included "The Mystery of Capital" and
"Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of Growth and
Prosperity" and "The Bottom Billion." This reading helped inform Mr.
Gates's belief that leading companies should find ways to sell to and
work with the poorest. "You have people who are inciting companies to
say, 'Look, this is a lot of people,'" Mr. Gates said.

Mr. Gates in his speech will note several programs that "stretch the
reach of market forces," including a World Health Organization venture
with an Indian vaccine maker to sell a meningitis vaccine in Africa for
far less than existing vaccines. He will also highlight a new program
designed to give African coffee farmers better access to coffee buyers
in rich counties. "We don't need some dramatic big new tax or
requirement," Mr. Gates said in the interview. "What we need is the
recognition of the creativity here that some of the leaders are exercising."

To a degree, Mr. Gates's speech is an answer to critics of rich-country
efforts to help the poor. One perennial critic is Mr. Easterly, the New
York University professor, whose 2006 book, "The White Man's Burden,"
found little evidence of benefit from the $2.3 trillion given in foreign
aid over the past five decades.

Mr. Gates said he hated the book. His feelings surfaced in January 2007
during a Davos panel discussion with Mr. Easterly, Liberian President
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and then-World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz. To a
packed room of Davos attendees, Mr. Easterly noted that all the aid
given to Africa over the years has failed to stimulate economic growth
on the continent. Mr. Gates, his voice rising, snapped back that there
are measures of success other than economic growth -- such as rising
literacy rates or lives saved through smallpox vaccines. "I don't
promise that when a kid lives it will cause a GNP increase," he quipped.
"I think life has value."

Brushing off Mr. Gates's comments, Mr. Easterly responds, "The vested
interests in aid are so powerful they resist change and they ignore
criticism. It is so good to try to help the poor but there is this
feeling that [philanthropists] should be immune from criticism."

Belief in Technology

A core belief of Mr. Gates is that technology can erase problems that
seem intractable. That belief was deepened, Mr. Gates says, by his study
of Julian Simon, a now-deceased business professor who argued that
increases in wealth and technology would offset shortages in energy,
food and other global resources.

Pacing in his office last week, Mr. Gates retold the story of a famous
$10,000 wager between Mr. Simon and Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University
professor who predicted that human population growth would outstrip the
earth's resources. Mr. Simon bet that even as a growing population
increased demand for metals such as tin and copper, the price of those
metals would fall within the decade ending in 1990. Mr. Simon won the
bet. "He cremated the guy," says Mr. Gates. Mr. Ehrlich's administrator
at Stanford University said he was out of the country and couldn't
comment on the wager.

In early 2006, Mr. Gates found further evidence of an improving world in
the online video of Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of international
health. In the video, Prof. Rosling used an enormous animated graph to
show that in the previous four decades life expectancy and family size
in developing countries had come to approach the levels of developed
countries.

The video so inspired Mr. Gates that he bought dozens of copies of Prof.
Rosling's textbook on global health. Watching Prof. Rosling's most
recent video last year, Mr. Gates saw the professor end his talk about
improving global health by swallowing a Swedish army bayonet, "to prove
that the seemingly impossible is possible," the professor said.

The influence of such optimists will be woven into Mr. Gates's comments
today. "In the coming decades we will have astonishing new abilities to
diagnose illness, heal disease, educate the world's children, create
opportunities for the poor and harness the world's brightest minds to
solve our most difficult problems," he will say.

Describing himself as an "impatient optimist," Mr. Gates said he will
ask each of his Davos listeners to take up a "creative capitalism"
project in the coming year.

And he vows to keep prodding them. "I definitely see, once I'm full time
at the foundation, reaching out to various industries -- going to
cellphone companies, banks and more pharma companies -- and talking
about how...they can do these things," he said.

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