Bill Gates pledged the same and yet his wealth hasn't reduced. Worse, the philanthropy has been targetted ideologically (like encouraging private schools) and somehow keeps ending up favouring companies he has ownership in.
The problem is charity with the privatising of schooling as a condition. Not unlike charity with the purchase of a specific type of seed sold by a specific company as a condition.
There is the establishment clause of the constitution in the US, which prevents the nation from establishing state sponsored religion. Courts have been pretty clear that compulsory religious elements in public school violates the establishment clause.
> The problem is charity with the privatising of schooling as a condition. Not unlike charity with the purchase of a specific type of seed sold by a specific company as a condition.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
Gates offers charity only under specific conditions, especially in Africa. He gives charity for schooling, if it's for private schools he could make money off of elsewhere (at the expense of public schools). He gives charity for agriculture, if it's for some specific seeds he makes money off of (at the expense of the local people choosing what they think is appropriate). He distorts poor economies towards his own ends, that is the problem.
Is he actually doing that?
You could say that private schools would attempt to serve anyone they can (just like any business), but public schools rob them of the opportunity. In this system, only the rich can escape, while non-rich get stuck with a botched socialized system at taxpayers' expense. Donating to allow more people to escape the public schools is thus a great cause.
[0] https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ny-school-spendi... [1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/econ/school-finances... [2] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/ny-per-pupil-schoo...
State money already goes to a dizzying array of non-profit and religious institutions. Anywhere from local homeless and addiction services to the University of Notre Dame. Why should primary and secondary schools be excluded?
> Private schools are fundamentally capitalistic
This is a meaningless statement. The VST majority of private schools in the US are non-profits.
> they serve their (generally wealthy) patrons, not society.
Religious schools in the US started out as a cheap way to educate the poor in reading. Catholic schools in particular still serve poorer communities and are low cost. Residential assignment in public schools comes from a legacy of segregation and anti-catholic laws. The wealth will always have their pick of education for their children and always have. Denying funding for poor students that want to opt out of their shitty assigned schools just perpetuates injustice.
I understand that you disagree, and you probably have thought-out reasons for that. You'll just have to understand that I do as well, and we can both skip the hours of wasted time where we try to convince each other (or an imaginary audience).
Better to ignore empty PR nonsense and wait for billions in philanthropy to actually materialize before showering sociopaths with praise and adoration.
Note that while I think most of the other replies are not necessarily pertinent in that giving away trickles is clearly not "most," the Gates Foundation has given a total of $65.6 billion to date, which is more than half of the Gates family's current net worth, but it isn't funded solely by him. That also means he can't decide unilaterally what to spend the money on, though. I was under the impression it was mostly global health until recently. The education initiatives are relatively new.
He could easily still be on track to give away some amount equal to whatever his net worth is on death by his death, though, and still meet a pledge to do it while alive. I don't know that anyone of extremely high net worth has ever tried to give away 50% all at once. I'm not sure that's even feasible in terms of finding organizations that could take and use that much money in a single year, other than donating directly to the US Treasury general fund.
Not to mention all the pond scum it draws in that has to be constantly filtered out.
MacKenzie Scott can’t give her wealth away fast enough, for example.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/business/mackenzie-scott-...
To be fair, neither can Bill Gates.
So it points to something fundamental about the way in which wealth works that these people can't give money away fast enough. Doesn't mean it's a problem though. Having money flowing up to Gates, Bezos, Scott and then having them give it away is probably the best we can do in the current legal and regulatory environment. Because the reality is that any efforts to change how things currently work would meet with too much resistance from others in power.
Edit: wrt to your reply, agree to disagree.
In the meantime he's given away billions, but obviously he's invested the billions he still has, so unless his (doubtlessly world-class) money managers were completely incompetent he's going to at least break even.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation "now spends more on global health every year than the World Health Organization — not to mention more than most countries on the planet."[1]
But that philanthropy has its critics. One criticism is that it's very opaque and it's impossible to measure how effective it is. It's also both hugely influential and unaccountable.
Also, from the above-linked article:
"One 2008 article by two Oxford researchers, published in The Lancet, argued that the Gates Foundation was "misfinancing global health" — paying most of its grants out to rich countries and prioritizing infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) over major chronic killers such as obesity, cancer, and diabetes."
"Another 2009 paper in The Lancet, by a group of University College London health and development researchers, found that despite the Gates Foundation's emphasis on improving the lives of the poor, its grants didn't actually reflect the burden of disease that the poorest face."
"An example: the Gates Foundation has received lots of positive press for its role in financing the eradication of polio. And yet, even that campaign had its critics, says McGoey. In her research, she found key stakeholders in some of the countries that were the focus of the campaign expressing the view that "this was really a priority of wealthy nations and not necessarily developing ones, many of which were more preoccupied with battling illnesses that created a far greater health burden in their nations [such as diarrhoeal diseases in India]. They were compelled to emphasize polio [eradication] against their will."
"Another concern that comes up in the academic literature is that the Gates Foundation is too focused on drugs, vaccines, and other technological solutions for global health problems. But many researchers, by contrast, would prefer a focus on the less exciting but crucial work of strengthening the health systems of poorer countries."
"For similar reasons, the Gates Foundation's work on malaria drew criticism from some corners. In a 2013 article in Global Society, Youde pointed out that the head of WHO’s malaria research, Arata Kochi, sent a memo complaining that the foundation "was stifling debate on the best ways to treat and combat malaria, prioritising only those methods that relied on new technology or developing new drugs.""
"The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."
[1] - https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...
Can you explain why the naive assumption is wrong? Because I actually can't, not without more thought and research than I've given it.
Gates can give substantially more money if he leverages it to grow over time. I would wager that it is going to take decades if ever that the Gates fund will hit $0. Yeah it's not as flashy as "Died with $0 of his fortune left", but under the hood the net good done is orders of magnitude greater.
If you can do that in perpetuity, then it actually means you're giving away none of your wealth away. You're selling the time value of money back to the people that generated it for you.
You've essentially taken out a giant loan, but the interest is being borne by the people who generated that wealth for you in the first place. And your "charity" amounts to sometimes reimbursing those people for paying the interest.
> Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.
Gates' wealth fluctuates all the time. There was a time when he was rather low due to his donations - multiple 10s of billions down. He got back over $100B from cca $50B - that's $50B more for charity than if he just donated everything he had left.
For instance, Chuck Feeney gave away billions until it he was left with only $2 million (or so it was reported).
If they truly wanted to just give it away, Chuck Feeney offer a straight forward model for doing so. You just do it. If "giving it away" merely means putting it into a foundation you control, many people would feel that little has, in fact, been given away.
And the PR? Let the guy have his fame, he's really worked for it.