I think you were a bit too negative but I don't agree with your downvotes.

Back to the topic: I agree with you. I think people underestimate, especially in the current Trumpist/Brexitist/etc. climate, the long term impact that lifting ~4 billion people out of poverty will have. By 4 billion people I mean China, India, Africa.

China's probably 20 years away from having 30% of the world's middle class in their country. India will probably follow the same trajectory, only with a 40 year delay. Africa is lagging but even there things seem to be moving and my money's on things accelerating as soon as they get some strong regional poles. Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia seem strong contenders.

I don't see my comment as negative. Both are good, but one is going to have an order of magnitude larger effect on scientific progress than the other.

To say that the effect of Gates's work will be to merely bring more people along for the ride instead of getting left behind as the original commenter stated is not understanding the full effect of his work. Gates is accelerating the ride.

Do you really think we don't have the human capital to do science? From what I can see, it's more that we have a shortage of plain old capital, and there are plenty of would-be scientists who take jobs in Wall St or at Twitter clones because there's no money for the science.

You only need one person if your bar is merely to "do science," but if you want to do more science, you need more people. Do you really think that if we increased the number of people who could be scientists by 10X that scientific advancement wouldn't significantly increase in velocity? Just look at how primitive modern medicine still is.

Where is the money for this 10x increase?

From the GDP lift caused by lifting large populations out of disease and poverty.

Thought experiment: how fast do you think our scientific knowledge would advance if 90% of the US were living in poverty and spent most of their day simply figuring out how to survive?

Sure, but the only way to lift large numbers of people out of poverty is growth. That's not something you can do by fiat.

You can't do it by fiat, but you can do it by redirecting funds to things that have larger impact on solving disease and poverty, which is what Gates is doing. At the end of WW2, ROK was one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest rates of literacy. Now it produces a large portion of the world's consumer electronics and has top quality research centers, in spite of never solving government corruption that whole time. This is mainly due to how well war reparations from Japan and aid from elsewhere were used to develop the country.

I agree with the sentiment and some aspects of science, like medical trials, may scale fairly well.

However the most significant scientific discoveries seem to come from the top of the pile. You need to be in the right place and time with the right background to make the right connections that reveal a previously hidden truth.

Science is about seeing something that's staring you in the face but nobody has even noticed before. That generally can't be farmed out.

So it's a long road from poverty to understanding to discovering something really new.

Even finding many major breakthroughs like the blue LED is ultimately just probability. The more people who are able to find them, the more breakthroughs you will find.

I don't know if you are right or not, and I think it is hard to measure. I certainly think you don't deserve downvotes for your otherwise positive message though.