FEATURE
Bill Gates Calls Forkinder Capitalism By Ji Luan Hong Kong - China
Bill Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But he’s grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He’s seen those failings first-hand on trips to places like the South African slum of Soweto and has discussed them with experts on disease and poverty. He’s troubled that advances in technology, health care and education tend to help the rich and bypass the poor. So why is capitalism failing much of the world! Among the Bill Gates fixes he plans to call for would be: companies creating 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.” Mr. Gates sees a greater role for himself in philanthropy now that he’s retired from full-time work at Microsoft – where he remains chairman. “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. “Microsoft, early on, was hardly a charity. We weren’t focused on the
needs of the neediest, 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.” ON BILL GATES’ BOOKSHELF
“The Theory of Moral Sentiments”: this 1759 book by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith arguing that humans are born with a moral sense and can derive happiness from the “fortunes of others.” “The White Man’s Burden”: by former World Bank economist William Easterly, this 2006 book lays bare the failings of five decades of international aid. “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”: Michigan University professor C.K. Prahalad made a case in this 2004 book for businesses to view the world’s poor as a viable consumer market. “The Bottom Billion”: in this 2007 book, former World Bank director Paul Collier contends that the gap in living standards is widening between the poorest fifty countries and the rest of the world. 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. Key to Mr. Gates’ 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. 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. A core belief of Mr. Gates is that technology can erase problems that seem intractable. And “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. I’m an impatient optimist. JL
Jo Lee
Spring 2010
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