They are not just pledging money away. These are serious investments that are evaluated in the same way a VC/Angel pick a startup. A colleague of mine tried to apply/pitch to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the event (many people pitched) lasted six hours with two reviews and rigorous questioning. He was not successful, but he said it was a very thorough examination.^1
Bottom line: A portion of these pledges are more than putting money into collection baskets, it is putting it into the baskets of third world women who need an extra sewing machine to make ten more shirts so their kids can go to school and have food.
1 - I am sure not every donation is made this way
I just wonder if Gates might have the ability to do far more if he just invested in himself.
Personally, I'd like to see him start a company that would invent a mobile phone battery that lasts for a month and can power an RC aircraft to fly all the way around the world.
I also worry about the overall risklessness of what he's doing. He's pledged all of his money, so who can criticize it? For most people it's beyond reproach just because of the stated goals.
When Gates dropped out of Harvard he was doing something that a lot of people thought was stupid. That's how big ideas are. I'd like to see him doing something that might actually result in people mocking him for having lost his fortune on a bad idea.
When doing something not-risky is bad, the reason is usually that it isn't ambitious enough: that you've avoided doing something that could have been better because you were afraid of failing. But the total eradication of malaria is not an unambitious, can't-possibly-fail undertaking: it's a huge task, it's not obvious that it can be done, and it would bring enormous benefit to the world. If it's immune to criticism, then as you suggest it's because it looks like a noble and generous thing to do. In other words, the lack of criticism isn't an indicator of lack of ambition, of aiming too low.
Instead of, say, eradicating malaria? You're kidding, right?
I might accept "greater good". There's no way I'll accept "greater malaria eradication".
The Gates Foundation is working on malaria eradication because it's one of those things where you really do get great returns by just attacking the problem head on. Batteries have nothing to do with malaria.
The other thing about super-batteries is that there's no shortage of sensible profit-chasing money pouring into it. If Sony, Samsung, Ford, Toyota, General Electric and Rolls Royce are all already pouring billions of dollars into it, there's not much point in Bill Gates throwing a couple of billion onto the pile. But apart from the Gates Foundation hardly anyone with deep pockets is targeting malaria.
I just used batteries as an example. The money being poured into batteries is commensurate with the overall value to society of creating them. This is not a market failure. The reason money isn't flowing to malaria prevention is because the structural problems that lead to the disease prevent the resulting human capital from having much of any economic value.
Wow, amazing. I'd hate to live in a world where you had a say.
Technology is going to advance just fine with or without Gates. We'll have eventually have batteries that last years or something that obsoletes them all together. Unless enough wealthy people get malaria it might never get cured without heroic efforts like what Gates is doing.
Amazing. Who cares about people dying, I want to be able to play Angry Birds non-stop when flying to Australia.
Given the impact of mobile devices we've seen in Africa so far, this sort of innovation would have a huge impact.
That said, I don't agree that Bill Gates is necessarily the best person to go solve this problem, nor that this would be an obviously more optimal area for him to invest in than those he's chosen so far.
He is changing the way development works. He is better funded than almost anyone else with no obligation to any other stakeholders (namely governments and political entities that use aid as a political chip).
He gets the opportunity to, as a private individual, challenge the market failures of our time. Who else is going to fund research aimed at saving the world's poorest with little chance of ROI? He can basically act like China does with their foreign aid but without taking all their natural resources in exchange.
If you truly think there is some big idea he is cowering from, you may have the greatest imagination I know of.
It doesn't read like a quest to give his fortune away, it looks more like a quest to try and solve some of the most intractable problems of poverty that the world faces. His legacy is trying to make the world a better place for the people sitting at the very bottom who capitalism has forsaken.
But philanthropy is an old fashioned way to solve problems. I guess I have this hope that someone like Gates would see a solution that took a very unexpected path.
Eradicating malaria is not something that is going to solve it's self, so it's a much bigger challenge.
Capitalism may be good at what it does, but it isn't the answer to all problems.
It's ultimately a socially lauded thing to do that divorces the donor from any ultimate responsibility for the amount of "greater good" done with the funds. I think they do it out of fear that they were a lucky, one-hit wonder... and out of low self-esteem or fear of the angry mob.
YC is a great example of a way to use wealth to make a real difference. PG uses his acumen to help a lot more people level up. This multiplies wealth. Spending it on charities simply redistributes it.
It makes me very pessimistic to see that the world's wealthiest people feel the need simply to pledge the money away, and no need to risk total failure by going out on a limb to do something bigger than whatever got them there.
What if Bill Gates tried some long shot idea and it flopped? What if Zuckerberg or Case did? That would take real courage. This pledge nonsense reminds me of the self-satisfied smirks people emit when publicly putting money into the collection basket in a church. Why isn't one of these rich guys going to bat for Wikileaks? (Probably because it feels a lot better to be praised all the time for being such a great person by all the sycophants trying to get you to write a check!)