Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.
I don't believe in creating dynastic wealth. I don't really believe that in a society that aspires to be meritocratic and that believes in equality of opportunity - my kids have had advantage over 99 percent of the kids in the country...
Test scores aren't perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.
It's paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they've been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle.
I could name about a dozen paths, and you'd like to have a whole bunch of research on all those paths, and then, eventually, at least four to five companies with really significant financing try and get to big scale, going down and really trying to prove it out.
here are economies like China's economy where it's less than a tenth [of a percent] today, although it is growing, is quite small, because of the notion that the government takes care of everything, and Europe and China, philanthropy has not been nearly of the same scale.
My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy.
I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.
Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're Making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.
The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.
There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young. I get very concerned when people talk about cutting education budgets.
The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.