[Marxism] Bill Gates at Harvard

[Eli Stephens]

Bill Gates gave the commencement address at Harvard. The speech is online 
here:

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/07/for-what-purpose.html

and I'll reproduce it below. I've added extended commentary on my blog here:

http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html#2713040621505204344

but for this list I'll assume everyone can draw their own conclusions and 
just post the speech.

Eli Stephens
  Left I on the News
  http://lefti.blogspot.com


I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the 
ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back…I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the 
world—the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that 
condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I 
got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries—but in how those 
discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, 
strong public education, quality healthcare, or broad economic 
opportunity—reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out 
of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about 
the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in 
developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.…

See also: Full text, audio

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week 
and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause—and you wanted to spend that 
time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and 
improving lives. Where would you spend it?…

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about 
the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from 
diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, 
malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease that I had never 
heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million children each year—none of 
them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had assumed that if millions of children were dying and 
they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and 
deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, 
there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being 
delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that 
some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to 
ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the 
priority of our giving.”…

We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives 
of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children 
died because their mothers and fathers had no power in the market and no 
voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more 
creative capitalism….

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that 
generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found 
a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to 
answer this challenge can change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there 
is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and 
will be with us until the end—because people just…don’t…care.”

I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.…

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and 
see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.…

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end 
the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal 
technology would be a vaccine that gives life-long immunity with a single 
dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations are funding vaccine 
research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the 
meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand—and the best prevention 
approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.…

The final step—after seeing the problem and finding an approach—is to 
measure the impact of the work and to share that success or failure so that 
others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show, for 
example, that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to 
be able to show, for example, a decline in the number of children dying from 
the diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to 
help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than 
numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work—so people can feel 
what saving a life means to the families affected.…

Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new 
tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They 
are new—they can help us make the most of our caring—and that’s why the 
future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age—biotechnology, the personal 
computer, and the Internet—give us a chance we’ve never had before to end 
extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and he announced 
a plan to assist the nations of postwar Europe. He said: “I think one 
difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the 
very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it 
exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear 
appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance 
to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without 
me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, 
more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network 
that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance 
and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number 
of brilliant minds we can bring in to work together on the same problem—and 
it scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.…

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great 
collections of intellectual talent in the world.

For what purpose?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the 
benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people 
here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its 
intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its 
name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors—the intellectual 
leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review 
curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be more dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst 
inequities? Should Harvard students know about the depth of global 
poverty…the prevalence of world hunger…the scarcity of clean water…the girls 
kept out of school…the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privileged learn about the lives of the world’s 
least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions—you will answer with your policies.…

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given—in 
talent, privilege, and opportunity—there is almost no limit to what the 
world has a right to expect from us.…

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on big inequities. I feel 
sure it will be one of the great experiences of your lives.…

You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect 
on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will 
judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on 
how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities…on how well you 
treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their 
humanity.

Good luck.

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