2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor

I'll bite. I believed it. Not only did I believe it until I read this letter, I thought Gates Foundation was doing an unintentional long-term disservice to the world by saving so many lives that overpopulation in the remote parts of the world will lead to more suffering due to starvation/hunger, poverty, and depression.

If X% of children in villages in Ghana are currently starving, how will raising that to 2X% starving-but-inoculated children help the world? I was never able to get that question answered sufficiently well. My background is in Econ and Comp Sci so I have a pretty good understanding of the impact of foreign aid. For the past decade, I've preferred the aid to be technological and infrastructural in nature instead of medical because I presumed that addressing the health needs of the existing population was merely plugging a hole on a broken dyke.

I really don't think she was calling me a baby-killer but rather questioning my faulty assumptions. I had made the same mistake that many others make when looking beyond their own monkey circles - that even people with little education make rational decisions about their lives, they're not mindless machines pushing out kids because that's what tradition or society demands. I never considered that the mothers in Ghana would have fewer children if earlier ones survived.

I assumed that because they are poor, did not have access to birth control, and were trying to maximize their long-term happiness, they would have as many kids as possible to maximize the chances of at least a few of them becoming successful. If you have two kids, both might be unemployed. If you have 12, maybe two of them will get good jobs and take care of you in the future. While this is great for the mother if two kids are successful, the other ten will end up repeating what she did and the cycle will continue ten-fold. I honestly believed that malaria was nature's way of minimizing long-term suffering.

There were too many faults in my assumption and I believed each of the myths up to a certain extent. My beliefs were not necessarily baseless, they were just completely out of date. I have a very hard time believing UN reports because of politics, corruption, and self-preservation interests of bureaucracy. However, I see no reason to assume Gates Foundation having any malevolence, especially since they're literally giving away their own money to improve the world long-term. So when they said my assumptions are in fact myths, I allowed them the chance to change my mind and by the end of the letter, I was cursing at myself for being so thick and wrong.

In addition to EFF, Wikipedia Foundation, and other tech causes, my future donations will also go to health/medical causes thanks to this single letter.

EDIT: If you want to know what REALLY blew me away, it was the single comparison shot of Mexico City 1986 vs 2011. My cousins in Mumbai grew up in the slums and now they post photos of their new [car|clothes|apartments] on Facebook. They were the kids bathing on the street and they weren't alone. Almost all of their friends are now working for multinationals in Delhi or Mumbai and most of them are doing better than their parents. An entire generation of slum-dwelling children have their own bathrooms, kitchens, and access to unlimited knowledge, technology, and medicine. I assumed that more people meant more slums. I did not realize that it could be fewer slums and more apartments.

> I don't see how your criticism refutes Myth 1

I'm not refuting that the myth is a myth (though I think its more of a strawman that Gates attacks poorly than a myth), I'm pointing out that Gates particular attempt to argue from so-called "income per person" trends (that starts with mistreating GDP per capita as "income per person") line of argument against the "myth" is fundamentally flawed.

I don't think poor countries are "doomed to stay poor". But I don't think Gates attacks on that supposed myth (which I don't think is really a particularly dominant belief) are very good, and particularly I don't think they support the alternative thesis he is presenting to the "myth" (which seems to nbe not merely that they aren't "doomed to stay poor", but that the "poor" countries are in fact not poor now.)

> Take a metric, look at it over time. Watch it change. That's exactly what Bill Gates did in his piece.

Except that the metric he takes (which he attempts to conceal by presenting it as something it is not) includes wealth extracted from the nation to other nations, as well as income earned in the nation, so it isn't actually a good measure to show whether the poor nations are actually getting less poor over time.

Taking a metric that doesn't actually measure the thing you are using it to measure is, well, wrong.

> Both of the replies I've received so far appear to completely misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying the population will grow without limit no matter what.

Point taken. I'm sorry, and you're right, I don't disagree with anything you actually said.

Honestly, like Gates, if a small amount of corruption happens - if some % get skimmed off to pad some salaries or expense reports, I'm not going to get too excited. People do that. It's the gratuitous bag of cash -> palace transfer that bothers me.