Summary of The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

 

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 

The Bill Gates Problem is a powerful investigation into Bill Gates's use of philanthropy to exercise immense political power without accountability. Despite allegations of misconduct and divorce proceedings, Gates remains a bully and monopolist, intent on imposing his ideas and leadership on others. The investigation shows Gates's billions have purchased control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Gates's social experimentation has shown itself to be undemocratic and ineffective, with many places hurting the very people he intends to help. The Gates Foundation's philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Nov 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223416333

Book preview

Lives Saved

In a 2019 debate at the Oxford Union, writer Anand Giridharadas argued that being a billionaire is immoral, highlighting the sins of the superrich and false promises of billionaire philanthropy. Giridharadas argued that the billionaires find clever ways to pay people as little as possible and as precariously as possible, avoid taxes illegally and legally, lobby for public policies that don't benefit the public interest, form monopolies that asphyxiate competition, cause social problems to make a profit, and use philanthropy to whitewash their reputations. However, Giridharadas and his team lost the debate, as they couldn't parry against Bill Gates. The opposing team argued that the Gates Foundation's good deeds have made them immoral, despite the fact that they have already saved several million lives. This talking point has become a conventional wisdom in mainstream discourse on Bill Gates, citing the millions of lives saved.

The lives-saved claim on Bill Gates' foundation is based on a questionable foundation. The foundation's claims of saving lives are based on a rote recitation of the foundation and its PR machinery. The foundation's numbers seem to come from the foundation or the groups it funds, such as the Center for Global Development, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Johns Hopkins University's Lives Saved Tool, and the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium. The foundation focuses almost all its public relations firepower on promoting its work on global health and development, as these are the areas where it can most forcefully point to success. In 2017, Warren Buffett asked Bill and Melinda Gates to reflect on their work with the $30 billion he had given the foundation.

They thanked Buffett for the biggest single gift anyone ever gave anyone for anything and used the metric of 122 million children's lives saved since 1990 as a metric of success. The foundation's public presentations and media outlets have praised the foundation's efforts, but the exact number of lives saved remains unknown.

The Gates Foundation's 122 million lives saved in childhood deaths over the decades is based on a graph from the Economist, which is based on a study by the Brookings Institution. The author of the Brookings study, John McArthur, said that the result one gets depends on the question one is asking, and that different counterfactuals will give different answers. This area where the Gates Foundation has unusual influence and power is by funding the studies and evaluations that tell the world what it is doing, shaping how the questions are asked or what data is used. The foundation also sometimes funds the news outlets that translate these research findings to the public.

The Gates Foundation does not respond to press inquiries for this book, so it is unclear how it arrived at its much-publicized number. Bill Gates's analysis seems to be based on a donothing counterfactual, imagining that without the Gates Foundation, mortality trends from the 1990s would have continued unchanged through the 2000s and 2010s. Such an analysis also doesn't tell us how many of those 122 million lives were saved directly because of Gates and how many saved lives were related to countless other variables and interventions that had nothing to do with the foundation.

However, many of Gates's claimed successes fall apart. A good case study is the foundation's work on rotavirus, which causes diarrhea and severe dehydration. Many of these avoided deaths have nothing to do with the foundation's work with vaccines. Real improving public health requires addressing more fundamental issues related to poverty, like making sure people have access to a healthy diet, clean water, healthcare, income, and housing.

Bill Gates's pharma-focused approach to public health has limitations, such as the fact that nearly half of all children worldwide are not vaccinated against rotavirus. Gates's narrative fails to account for the millions of lives lost each year, which are often preventable or treatable diseases. He believes that patents and intellectual property protections reward companies for their research and development costs, leading to high prices. However, if the patent system were changed, companies would have no incentive to develop new drugs, and lives would be lost. Gates's stance is informed by his career at Microsoft, which relies on patent and copyright considerations that drive the pharmaceutical industry. He sees pharmaceutical companies and their patent-forward business model as saving lives, and believes that their partnership with pharmaceutical companies has allowed them to save about 10 million lives and achieve their goal of 50 million in the next