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Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

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Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#291

Post by gozur88 »

pharrington wrote: post #290
gozur88 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a good label for the US healthcare system, but it's so heavily regulated it's impossible to call it "private". >Just because the Soviet Union fell over doesn't mean that capitalism has somehow been proven to be "the best solution". Name one country implemented socialism (and by that I mean the government owns the means of production) and didn't end up worse off than when it started. Even the Northern Eur…

China.

Not even close. 40 million people starved to death under the communists.

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#292

Post by pharrington »

gozur88 wrote: post #291
pharrington wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China.

Not even close. 40 million people starved to death under the communists.

You asked to name a country that ended up worse. Since we are not at the end of history, the only consistent way to interpret "ended up" is "in its state as of the time of this statement."

edit: My above interpretation isn't quite right. It should be "its state as of the latest known point in time the predicate was true."

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#293

Post by Iknown0thing »

mikeyouse wrote: post #250
Iknown0thing wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as like the new way of distributing wealth in this manner, some of the foundations Christians fundamentals worry me. For example - https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/gran... I tried looking for similar grants to religious services organizations from other religions, but my search came up empty. Very happy to stand corrected on this.

This is a silly complaint -- Some of the 'religious' grant money goes to Catholic Relief Services who happen to be one of the largest charity groups operating in Africa. Most of these funds go to Agriculture / emergency relief. They've also given over $150 million to the Islamic Development Bank to support their vaccine efforts and smaller amounts to dozens of other Muslim-based groups for different initiatives. Like…

Just because it is called Islamic development bank does not make it a religious organization. Point here is - look at the profiles of some of the organizations. Some of them based on fundamentals I am not sure I feel comfortable about. Also about catholic church in Africa, see Rwanda case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Rwanda#1994_Genoci...

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#294

Post by nostromo123 »

burkaman wrote: post #190
canoebuilder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise some worthy questions, particularly, Is there no room for population expansion in Africa? with which I would be happy to engage, but without knowing that we are operating on the same baseline level of reality, I'm hesitant to do so. Why would people start leaving Africa, and why would it be a problem if they did? Are you completely unaware of events that have been transpiring in Europe the past couple years…

But I don't think it makes sense to compare population expansion to a refugee crisis. People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave. In your hypothetical, I assume people are leaving for economic and social reasons, normal motivations for voluntary immigration. I don't think the refugee crisis will continue forever, and I don't think malaria eradicatio…

The fewest are real refugees fleeing war and violence. Most migrants are just doing it for economic reasons.

This leads to surreal situations like in Germany, where asylum seekers went for holidays in the countries they had "fled" from in the first place. Everything on welfare payment, and the legal explanation was some convoluted "they have a human right to go back to their own country" kind of argument.

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#295

Post by nostromo123 »

bluthru wrote: post #289
bluthru wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave. That was probably true in the past, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore: "The UN has said that seven in 10 people crossing the Mediterranean from Libya are economic migrants and the rest are 'people in need of protection' like refugees and asylum-seekers." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-…

Downvoted for citing UN data. Unbelievable.

I absolutely agree with you -- the great proportion of migrants are coming for economic reasons.

It seems that clear-cut numbers that do not fit the "women & children escaping war-torn Syria" narrative have a tendency to get down-voted...

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#296

Post by undersuit »

olewhalehunter wrote: post #213
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between someone who went from upper middle class to billionaire, like Gates, and someone who inherited most of their wealth, like other people. I don't think lumping them together into a monolithic N% is productive for purposes of discussing policy.

Bill Gates was not upper "middle class", his household was solidly in the 1%, he had computer programming access at his private school (this is 1968), and his mother's friendship with the president of IBM at the time was the reason he got contracted to write DOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career

I've heard the same confused argument in the barrage of anti-Zuckerberg comments that came out after the most recent "Will Zuckerberg run for president?" articles. Gates and Zuckerberg lived in wealthy households with parents who worked. They may have been 1% in income, but their riches now place them so much higher on the income scale it's ludricrous to try and compare their incomes to their parents. To attack their childhood as privileged discounts all the other people who were less well off during childhood who had made similar gains in wealth and perpetuates a very limited argument that all the 1% are bad. Essentially Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as children were closer to the rest of the nation financially then they are now. You want to attack the privileged; wait until their children start doing things.

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#297

Post by gozur88 »

pharrington wrote: post #292
gozur88 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. 40 million people starved to death under the communists.

You asked to name a country that ended up worse. Since we are not at the end of history, the only consistent way to interpret "ended up" is "in its state as of the time of this statement." edit: My above interpretation isn't quite right. It should be "its state as of the latest known point in time the predicate was true."

But China abandoned socialism in the '70s. It's only been since then the country started to turn it around.

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#298

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #272
randyrand wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure how much of a problem this really is. 88% of the very wealthy ($30+ million) in the USA made their wealth themselves. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/10/where-... ...the best source I could find.

That's with a long history of estate taxes and strong economic growth. Also, if you look at Americans with 10+ billion far more than 12% inherited their money. The US has been stagnating with lower GDP growth rate over time which will likely change these numbers. Because the low % of inhered wealth is mostly due to large numbers of new wealthy not children of the wealthy losing their money. http://www.lagunabeachbiki…

[deleted]

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#299

Post by rusk »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #281
rusk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cross-referencing jk2323 here who makes an interesting point in this regard [0] *He should improve contraception instead* You're pointing out that a lot of these organisations are based on a Catholic ethos. Given the church's outspoken position on contraception, could the pointed nature of these donations actually be doing some harm? Given 1000 donors donating a million vs 1 donor with a billion (as somebody els…

When donors with different biases donate to causes with different political implications, they don't always average out. Sometimes they cancel out. For example political campaign donations are obviously zero-sum, as is lobbying for mutually exclusive well-intentioned causes.

You're presuming a zero-sum balance between all causes political and/or charitable. I'd need to see this thesis more thoroughly fleshed out before I could comment further, but I think on the face of it it's grossly a flawed assumption. Maybe that's not what you mean though.

Re: Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

#300

Post by saint_fiasco »

rusk wrote: post #299
saint_fiasco wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When donors with different biases donate to causes with different political implications, they don't always average out. Sometimes they cancel out. For example political campaign donations are obviously zero-sum, as is lobbying for mutually exclusive well-intentioned causes.

You're presuming a zero-sum balance between all causes political and/or charitable. I'd need to see this thesis more thoroughly fleshed out before I could comment further, but I think on the face of it it's grossly a flawed assumption. Maybe that's not what you mean though.

Only political causes. And only most of them.

For example suppose that we want to do a cost-benefit analysis to see if convincing people to use contraception is a more effective charitable intervention than whatever Gates is doing.

If the Catholic Church really hates contraception, they would oppose that. They might tell Catholic charities to refuse to work with Gates. They might spend a little money and a lot of cheap labor on convincing people to not use contraception. Generally they will spend resources on doing the opposite thing and Gates would have to spend more resources just to cancel out the Catholic influence.

Since we know beforehand that this is very likely to happen, we should include that in the cost part of our cost-benefit analysis. It's possible Gates did just that and concluded that working with Catholics instead of against them is better.

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