Cord Blomquist

Gates Admirable as Entrepreneur

When reading an interesting piece on morality by Steven Pinker in The Age, I read a line that has become all to familiar to me. Pinker, in an effort to be contrarian and illustrate why our moral inclinations may be incorrect, pointed out that even guys like Bill Gates aren’t bad, noting:

Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasites.

This refrain is repeated throughout the popular media when discussing Bill Gates. While I agree that Bill Gates ought to be admired for his monumental charitable efforts, can’t we also admire him for being an entrepreneur and creating countless billions in wealth?

After all, Gates didn’t just create wealth for himself or Microsoft, he’s also made the world a whole lot richer. Like it or not, it was Windows that provided the platform for much of the information revolution, which subsequently created a worldwide economic boom. We shouldn’t relegate this accomplishment to a mere footnote in Mr. Gates’ biography and it’s certainly worth considering the moral implications of that sort of wealth creation.

In a Christopher Hitchens-like move, Pinker also speaks about Mother Teresa:

Mother Teresa extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and primitive medical care.

He goes on to note that:

These examples show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish.

By that standard, even if Gates spent his fortune solely on mega-yachts and sports franchises he’d still beat Mother Teresa hands down. If we’re talking human flourishing, how can you beat creating an operating system that runs on 90+ percent of PCs has likely contributed trillions to global GDP over the last quarter century? Only super heroes to humanity like Norman Borlaug, also mentioned by Pinker and winner of CEI’s Julian Simon Award, can rise above Gates.

Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bill Gates has done a lot of good for the world, both as a philanthropist and as a CEO.

February 22, 2008 | Comments |

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    Our society has firmly established that giving someone five dollars in charity is better than selling them something that gives them twenty dollars of benefit for only ten dollars.

    I have the sneaking suspicion that Gates is engaged in a long term moral experiment: how much money does a rich non-celebrity have to give away before people forgive him for being rich. I think he'll find that 100% isn't enough -- he'll have to start giving away other people's money before we like him. After all, look how we applaud those who do?
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    After all, Gates didn’t just create wealth for himself or Microsoft, he’s also made the world a whole lot richer. Like it or not, it was Windows that provided the platform for much of the information revolution, which subsequently created a worldwide economic boom.

    This is a silly argument, for a variety of reasons that should be apparent to anyone with a slight faith in market based outcomes. I'll just give the single largest example here, and follow up in few days with a post on this misinformation.

    Had Microsoft or Windows never existed, another company would have stepped in to fill the market demand for a PC Operating System. So to make the argument that Bill Gates is personally responsible for the wealth creation of the PC revolution doesn't hold water unless you demonstrate that there was something unique that Bill Gates brought to the table. So, when I bought a PC in 1991 for a construction site office (it was rare at that time, believe it or not) it came preloaded not with windows but PC GEOS, a non-MS product that MS used it's anti-competitive practices to crush. If a true competitive market for PC Operating System had been part of the regulatory policy at the time (i.e., had MS been quickly enjoined from using it's anti-competitive practices to first crush PC GEOS and then BEOS) it's quite probable that we would have had better OS's faster, due to competitive market forces. Instead, we had MS enrichment, not wealth creation.
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    "If we’re talking human flourishing, how can you beat creating an operating system that runs on 90+ percent of PCs has likely contributed trillions to global GDP over the last quarter century?"



    By creating one that is free for any users including businesses. How does restricting the freedom of users make for a "flourishing" society?

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    Greetings,

    Free? purely free at all times for everyone, everywhere?

    Congratulations, you've just destroyed civilization. Without some dynamic, social or economic tension, limitations in other words, things have a tendency to explode.

    Economic growth is a better long term solution, or continuation of society which is the ever moving solution, is far superior to the Instant-Gratification-Junkie's knee-jerk reaction of FREE IS GOOD! RARRGH!

    I remain, as always,
    Mad-Hamlet
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    respected sir,
    how you reached your milestone is amazed and i will take an inspiration from your feet and i will struggle to become like you.
    thankingyou sir
    ravi kumar
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