Gates' activities in the field of education are pretty bastardish. He's providing leveraged funds that give money to educational endeavors if and only if they also invest in for-profit programs that he likes, many of which
do not work, or at least demonstrably do not work as well as other programs that may be in place. For preschool specifically, that's not much of an issue - the US already has for-profit preschool as its primary model (compulsory public education starts at Kindergarten in most jurisdictions). But for places in education where the majority of the funds are public (elementary school, for example), that's a pretty big problem.
The thing is: I actually
don't think it's a grand conspiracy. I do however think it highlights a larger problem in our society: eccentric billionaires have voices in policy and politics that are millions of times louder than normal people,
even when those "normal" people are actually experts in the field being discussed! Bill Gates is one of the least qualified people in the world to talk about education - especially higher education. Remember that his own history is that his parents got him into the most exclusive schools, and then he happened to make friends with enough people who were also interested in what would turn out to be the largest tech field in human history right at the moment that it was starting to expand but you could still progress the field from a garage - and then he dropped out of school and took a giant pile of his dad's money and formed a company. It's about as much of a charming "self made man" story as is possible to have when the beginning is "his dad was so rich that he could attend a preparatory school so expensive that they had an actual computer in
1968, a mere
fifteen years before the production of the Apple IIe that would
eventually find its way to the public schools I attended.
Bill Gates' life story is not replicated one time in ten billion, and we may never see the same sort of thing again. The combination of people with natural talent with large amounts of family money being given tremendously early access to an emerging technical field and then finding enough like-minded people in college to start a company with the aforementioned family money as starting capital is pretty much one-off. So the idea that Bill Gates has any special knowledge of how to educate people to become productive citizens is fairly laughable. If you picked a random person making $60,000+ a year, the chances of them having a better grasp of what makes the education system work and not-work is almost 100%. You could also go to people who actually study these issues, and they would presumably know even more. Because early childhood development and education sociology are totally fields that people do research in.
I actually think that Bill Gates is probably sincere in his desire to improve education. He is just completely unqualified to tell people how to do that. Certainly, his malaria plans seem sincere and relatively well thought out.
Here's the malaria problem: malaria kills people. Lots of people. Also it causes
huge losses of productivity as nearly the entire population of many tropical countries lose weeks of work or school
every year to malaria. In 2010, there were
216 million malaria cases, holy shit! If you made a country out of the people who got malaria last year, it would be the fifth largest country on Earth.
And yet: there is almost no money going into research into how to combat this disease. WTF?
Malaria
used to be a big problem in Europe and the United States. But between draining swamps and massive use of DDT, it was eliminated from those regions in the 20th century. New problem: the remaining mosquitoes are DDT resistant and our insecticides lost their efficacy at pushing the malaria line. DDT got discontinued and the mosquitoes have actually been pushing the malaria line the wrong way ever since.
Malaria research is currently just not being done by Western governments (their lack of investment is justified because few of their citizens get malaria - just a handful of imported cases a year). It's also not being done by private firms (because they get paid for vaccines produced, and the areas where malaria vaccines are needed are also poor and can't afford them). And it's not being done by the tropical governments (this is least understandable, because they have so much to gain - but as long as there are still starving people and the president doesn't have a gold plated Mercedes to go with his other gold plated Mercedes, it is very hard to get African governments to sign up for expensive multi-decade investment programs).
Now Bill Gates is throwing tens of millions of dollars into malaria fighting. And he is doing it on several fronts:
- He is directly subsidizing some malaria research. A few million here, a few million there to various research groups tackling the problem from various angles.
- He is giving money to various public health initiatives. Buying mosquito netting, anti-malarials, and similar stuff for affected regions.
- He is pledging money to buy malaria vaccines for some people who couldn't afford them should they become available.
- He is pledging money to provide price supports so that companies that make vaccines will be more profitable.
Now that last one is pretty weird, since it's basically just spending money on
not giving vaccines to people. But the idea is that it is an incentive to get people to invest in malaria vaccines, because if they succeed in making one the profits will be higher than the people of Niger can afford to make them on their own.
It's an interesting plan, and probably what you have to do if you want the private sector to make a malaria vaccine. Now it would obviously be more efficient to have governments research a malaria vaccine and then give it out for free, and then pay for it in the long run with the extra seven hundred and fifty million weeks of work that would be freed up every year (roughly $150 billion a year forever). But Bill Gates points out quite correctly that governments have not stepped up to the plate on this issue and there is no particular reason to believe that they will start doing so any time soon. Trying to entice the private sector to throw research dollars that way with price support prizes is a reasonable alternative.
But here's the thing: he's using almost exactly the same model in education, where it's totally unwarranted. The governments of the US and Europe
do invest in public education, why the fuck would you think we needed price supports for privately funded education alternatives? What we
need is more public investment and more attention paid to the quite extensive body of evidence-based education outcome research we already have - and
less reliance on transformative educational fads presented by people who have no idea what the fuck they are talking about and clear financial conflicts of interest.
-Username17
