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Man Fish Proverb | 278 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Ahh.... perspective
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 10:49 PM EDT
Um. The ROI goes to the funded institution - not to the
foundation. The foundation really doesn't look profitable.
(haven't been over their financials, or looked at BG's
investment history.) If you like, I suppose you could view
it as philanthropy for capitalists.

I'm not sure you're right here. The problem is that some
things (like vaccine production) require infrastructure that
isn't reliably available in those nations.

One approach would be to try to found educational
institutions that taught people to make vaccines...and build
up the know-how and industry...after somehow arranging
(slavery??) for stable government so that those institutions
weren't burnt down too often...but that's a lot more than 3B
- I see the foundation's approach as pretty reasonable in
terms of optimizing short-term impact. I think I could make
an argument that this sort of work is likely to free up a
lot of resources that will actually create more long-term
impact that straight-up infrastructure/education investment.

The other would be to arrange for donations guaranteeing xx
vaccine purchases yearly to vaccine companies.

(Not necessarily the best, or most accurate example.)

Another would be funding development of smartphone-based
diagnostic applications. No use in the USA, no profit ever,
but quite a bit better than nothing and affordable to
hospitals in underdeveloped nations. Now, there's no way
those nations could produce cellphones any time soon, but
they can take advantage of them.

And, the thing is...there's really no money to be made in
this area - so any money spent really is philanthropy. It
might be better if the foundation insisted that all
generated IP be freely licensed - but - for a lot of stuff -
I'm not at all sure it matters either because suing a
company in an underdeveloped nation is usually a waste of
time or because no one could produce drug X there even if
there were no patents.

That said, I'd be shocked to find out that BG wasn't also
arrogant and high-handed in his approach - I just do believe
that this actually fits a reasonable definition of
philanthropy.

--Erwin

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Man Fish Proverb
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 11:13 AM EDT
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man how to fish, and he will drink beer in a boat all
summer.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • ROFL - n/t - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 04:30 PM EDT
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