You’d be wrong. It’s actually under the “Options” tab. According to Microsoft engineers*, this is strictly to keep you on your toes and prevent you from becoming complacent.

*Note: The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent the opinions of actual Microsoft engineers, none of whom were consulted in any way other than presumably in the writing of this post.

I want to reiterate that I’m not against charitable giving per se, nor even large-scale philanthropic giving at Bill Gates’ level. Rather, I am concerned with the issues of power around such giving, the way that giving on Gates’ scale (as opposed to the average person’s charity) warps the field of social services by focusing resources in particular areas–areas dictated by the interests of the wealthy. I am even thankful that those funds are being made available–but I am made uncomfortable by the randomness with which those funds have come to be used for Gates’ specific set of interests. If Gates had been rather interested in the traffick in women and children, or in child labour in Indonesia, or whatever, those are the areas that would have received his funds, not reproductive health and infectious disease issues.

Because of the immensity of Gates’ wealth (which outweighs many countries’ GDPs) his philanthropy cannot help but massively restructure the fields in which he invests–just as Microsoft’s investments have shaped the development of the IT field over the last decade-plus. Gates is a shrewd businessman, and I am sure that he has considered his charitable giving shrewdly, investing in fields that seem to him to offer the greatest potential benefit and the most efficient application of his funds. But is he necessarily the person best-equipped to make those sorts of decisions? The way we think of property tells us that Gates is free to use his money in whatever way he sees fit, and we should be thankful that he has chosen to apply it in the service of mankind, but maybe he is not the best person to decide how his wealth should be distributed.

Deeper than this is Gates’ involvement in the system on which his wealth is premised. As I said before, the conditions that made Gates wealthy are the same conditions that make other people poor. Humanity, rather than being able to apply that wealth widely to problems, has had to wait until Gates’ personal decision to apply it narrowly. (I should note that it’s not just Gates, but all the beneficiaries of massive and rising inequalities in wealth distribution–Gates is just the example at hand. Gates has chosen to invest in causes I believe in, rather than, say, the anti-abortion movement, or the family values movement, but that doesn’t change the power dynamics at play.)

It is this investment in remedying the symptoms of massive exploitation that I find questionable. The same patent laws that Gates has used to bolster his personal fortune (and that of his company) have been used by pharmaceutical companies to deny access to medical care in the countries that Gates now wants to support it. The poverty that Gates exploited by using prison labour is the same poverty that causes the spread of infectious diseases. What Gates is decidedly not doing is using his wealth to challenge the basis of that wealth, to forestall the exploitation that lays at the root of his pet causes.

How does that jibe with the more typical charitable giving of myself or of Stephen Bates, who even works as on the executive committee of his favored charity? First, I disagree with Bates’ characterization of this as "a difference of scale, not substance"–the quantitative difference between our giving and Gates’ is so large as to become a qualitative difference. The application of several times many Third World country’s GDP just in the domain of health services will have a massive impact, far outstripping any typical individual’s, or even most non-profit organizations’, potential effect.

But more compelling to me is the source of that wealth. It’s not so much that I consider Gates’ wealth "ill-gotten" (to use Bates’ term) simply because he has carried out some unsavory, anti-competitive business practices. There are many sources of wealth, and Gates’ is probably one of the least malignant–unlike some companies, Microsoft does not appear to have been involved in acts of genocide, torture, murder, or the overthrow of democratic governments (I could be wrong about Microsoft’s relatively clean hands in this regard, however). But Microsoft has been, under Gates’ direct leadership and afterwards, complicit in the expansion of corporate power at the expense of public power, in the drive for lowered wages and higher profits, in the dissemination of a corporate, free-market ideology that drives IMF sanctions and structural adjustment programs–all of which have directly or indirectly contributed to the disempowerment of people around the world and the denial of basic services. Although individual workers indirectly support this system when we work for companies like Microsoft, we have not been instrumental in defining it and in bringing it about. The wealth that we manage to accumulate is, roughly, sufficient to sustain ourselves and our families and to participate in our communities, part of which can include charitable giving–it is not enough to effect massive systemic change in the way wealth is distributed.

Where Bates’ argument is most compelling, to me, is in its pragmatism. I agree that, given the state of the world at the moment, I’d rather have someone like Bill Gates blowing his wad on vaccines and pre-natal care clinics than on yachts and sports cars. I, and ostensibly Bates, give part of what’s left over after our basic needs are met because we recognize that the system is not meeting those needs for everyone, that some people and some causes are not taken care of in our society. We contribute as best we can. One of the reasons our system is unable to meet these needs, however, is because of the wealth-acquitisitiveness of Gates and his hyper-wealthy cohort. The resources that they have drawn away from these services (and which they may or may not choose to selectively invest back into them) has produced the gap that good samaritans try to fill in some limited way.

I don’t think Gates is a bad person for divesting himself of his wealth in the service of society–I think he is a person who is trying to do the Right Thing in a system that doesn’t normally encourage doing good. But I don’t admire him for giving away money that he shouldn’t, in any ethical framework worthy of the name, have had in the first place, that was gained at the expense of a wide swath of human necessities, some of which he proposes to replace now. Ultimately, I am proposing a reexamination of the basis foundations of our society, and I know that’s not very practical. Maybe I should simply keep my peace, rather than risking the flight of Gates’ and his fellows’ capital from the few areas they have chosen to feed it back into. But I feel that these questions should be raised and discussed, and I thank Bates (and before him, Jeanne d’Arc) for giving me (and I hope others) a chance to do so. As for Gates, maybe he has had a change of heart, as Bates suggests–I think that having a family can do that to some people–but that doesn’t exonerate him for his past and ongoing negative contribution to the shape of current affairs.

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It’s not often I disagree with Jeanne d’Arc in any fundamental way, but in this case I definitely do. Like the robber barons of yore, Gates’ philanthropy is a gesture–a huge gesture, of course, given how much money is involved, but a gesture nonetheless. Gates refuses to even address, let alone challenge, the political conditions in which poverty, disease, and poor pre- and neo-natal care are rooted–for instance, "He blandly ducks a pointed question from Moyers asking him to comment on the Bush administration’s opposition to funding for reproductive health and family planning services worldwide." A commitment to change without considering the means by which real empowerment of the people affected by the status quo can be achieved isn’t a great leap forward, it’s a band-aid. Yes, Bill Gates’ aid may help ease the suffering of thousands, even millions of impoverished people, but it does nothing to prevent or stem further suffering.

But that’s not my real issue with Gates. The big problem is that Gates–through the "ruthless" business practices Salon notes but claims are "nothing compared to the right of a child in India or Uganda to live free of crippling disease" (and who could argue with the right of children to live free of disease?)–has amassed enough wealth (and the power that goes with it) to make these decisions for people all over the world. This is the philanthropic problem, that individuals–through the exploitation of workers (prison labor and temp workers, in Gates case), tax codes, consumers, the environment, etc.–become the conduit for basic necessities. History has shown that capitalists are very selective in their philanthropic programs, generally investing only in those areas that mesh most closely with the interests of capital. Around the turn of the 20th c., Rockefeller, Mellon, and Carnegie invested in universities and libraries, for instance, to help meet the emerging need for a well-educated, literate management class; a half-century later, the Rockefellers invested heavily in the promotion of Area Studies around the world, to supply the new American demand for accurate and organized knowledge for the attainment of Cold War objectives. Public health and hygiene, whether in the Third World or in the slums and ghettoes at home, have long been favored by capitalists–of course it looks great to donate to such causes, but it also helps to sustain an exploitable pool of labor. It probably doesn’t hurt that the diseases of the poor have often managed to find their way into the homes of the rich–a risk that has only become greater with the rise of rapid cargo transportation that has made many of today’s fortunes possible.

Of course, keeping people healthy and safe is a Good Thing, one which I can hardly object to. What I object to is allowing a limited number of people to decide what problems are important and how those problems should be addressed. Are Gates’ personal concerns necessarily those of the world as a whole? What if he’s incorrect, or if something goes wrong? What if the solutions he favors work fine in ex-Soviet Georgia but fail miserably in rural India?

This is not a question of expertise–I assume that Gates is smart enough to work through organizations that know what they’re doing–but of selectivity and, ultimately, accountability. Gates is not funding a program to relieve suffering through state- and region-level political and economic reforms, he is funding a handful of issues that interest him. And, ultimately, if a program he has funded fails, he can say he gave it his best shot and it just didn’t work. He’s already consigned himself to the financial loss by deciding to give the money away. Nobody selected him as their representative, on health or any other issue. And nobody can "unselect" him–Gates has no reason to listen to even listen to the complaints of those people who feel his intervention in their lives is unwarranted (and it does happen, all the time–medicines are rejected, medical advice refused and even resented–notably by those who question, with good reason, the motivations of the foreigners dispensing their wares).

But from the viewpoint of those whose suffering he wishes to alleviate, it’s not just a matter of resources ill-spent, it’s a matter of resources that no longer exist to address their needs. Gates gets a clear conscience and a slightly more manageable bank statement, but the poor have to continue to suffer.

Ultimately, it is the practices of capitalists like Gates that need to change if the problems of poverty are going to be addressed in any meaningful way. Although in the Salon article Gates comes off as part of the solution to these problems, he and his ilk are part of the problem. Maybe the biggest part of the problem.

Jeanne d’Arc has written intelligently and even bravely on the Mother Theresa Redemption Racket, showing how Mother Theresa sold redemption to the worst sort of exploitive scum, over the long term underwriting and sustaining their actions. Gates’ actions, while involving wealth an order of magnitude (maybe several orders of magnitude) greater, is more of the same–an investment of money earned through the exploitation of the poor in the handful of causes that matter most to him. I actually respect Gates a lot more than most of his colleagues at Augusta, for recognizing that all that money had better uses than lining his own pockets, but that doesn’t change wrongness of a system in which (mostly) men who screw people over the most are rewarded by being able to make decisions that a) effect millions of people, and b) ultimately maintain the status quo.

(A bit of a disclaimer: I’ve worked for non-profits funded, in whole or in part, from the endowments of the very very rich, including Andrew Carnegie. While that may seem to contradict what I’ve written above, I don’t think it does. There’s nothing wrong in choosing to apply one’s labour to whatever causes one feels drawn to, for whatever reason. I love that Jimmy Carter works with Habitat for Humanity, and have no complaints that the time he gives to this organization is time he doesn’t give to, say, the Red Cross or Greenpeace. What Gates’ does is different–Gates takes the surplus wealth generated by other people’s labour and applies it in the way he sees fit. The organizations I worked for were doing important things, I believe, and I was happy to be able to contribute to that–but I would not feel so happy if I had worked for an organization that, say, included one workday a week at the charity of my bosses’ choice.)

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