Do I Look Younger than Bill Gates?

Nerds of a feather....

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Inside Bill's Brain, which Netflix is heavily promoting. Bill Gates and I are contemporaries.  Indeed, back in 2013 I made a "Slidecast," a streaming PowerPoint presentation with an audio track as accompaniment, called Simple Quiz, which featured a list of famous contemporaries and then me after first posing the question: what do these people have in common?  Alas, Slideshare stopped supporting Slidecasts a few years ago, but you can see the video version and the original slides are also still available. The background music in the video is a Midi version of the song It Was A Very Good Year.

Years earlier, I had become fascinated with the idea of students making presentations that were largely images, with a small amount of text as narration, and then background music to make it all come together.  I tried it out in a CHP class in 2009 (Campus Honors Program students seem receptive to instructor experimentation) as a novel form of writing, since some students took the class to satisfy the Advanced Composition requirement.  I've since used it occasionally in my course on The Economics of Organization, where the students have written a review paper first of some article in an economics journal that is relevant to the course.  I've referred to the presentation as a "virtual elevator speech."  What's interesting in this context is whether the students trust that their image choices are good enough to represent the ideas in their review paper.  For those that did it well (meaning they put in real effort in the image selection) the result was satisfying.  Others, however, had way too much text on the screen, defeating the purpose of exercise.  Also, some students weren't very attentive to production values, though this was probably a failure of my coaching.  Their presentations would end abruptly, before the song reached its end.  The slide timings need to be adjusted so the presentation and the song conclude simultaneously.

Getting back to my Simple Quiz, the music held the clue to answer the question.  The presentation itself was my type of shaggy dog story, including me with the others, all of whom are/were quite famous. Each of us was born in 1955 - it was a very good year.   I'm a bit older than most of the other people listed in Simple Quiz, since my birthday is in January.  Bill Gates was born in October. I had always thought of him as having a boyish appearance.  Watching that episode in Netflix was the first time I can recall his appearance showing his age, noticeably gray and with lots of wrinkles in his face.

I found that I compared myself with Bill Gates in other ways as well.  There is a superficial similarity between us.  I too was a math nerd and in junior high and high school had a reputation as a very smart guy.  And I also had lots of issues with my mother during adolescence.    Then, much later in life, I've also found an interest in doing volunteer work in Africa, albeit via totally online interactions.

Now I want to be a bit critical of the video, which is probably not too shrewd on my part as the organization that I work with likely will be making an application to the Gates Foundation for support sometime in the not too distant future.  On the other hand, I try to be skeptical when I hear stuff and I think other viewers of this Netflix series should be skeptical as well.  Here are the main issues in what I saw.

1.  The Gates Foundation has spent a large sum on what appears to be Bill Gates' pet project, figuring out an environmentally friendly way to dispose of human waste in LDCs, so the spread of disease is thwarted and clean drinking water can be provided.  In the first episode, the focus was on technological solutions to this problem.

My critique here is based on my experience supporting ed tech projects on campus in the mid 1990s and early 2000s.  I came to conclude that you had to end-to-end the solution, and identify all possible points of failure.  Murphy's Law favors these sorts of hopeful projects which show possibility but ignore the pitfalls. They will fail in this case, as the pitfalls will invariably be confronted.  Further, the success of innovators and early adopters can fool us into believing that the success will be generally available to majority adopters, though that may not be true.   Apart from bringing down the cost of the technological solutions, which was mentioned in the video (Bill Gates made a simple math error in discussing this; he said that costs must be reduced by a factor of 10 when they actually must be reduced by a factor of 100) what else is needed for successful diffusion?  Is he expecting foundations like his to underwrite the adoption of the technology or foreign aid budgets to do that?  Foreign aid wasn't mentioned at all in what I saw.  My sense of things is that it has been reduced greatly since the Reagan Revolution began (when Bill Gates got his big break by winning the contract to write the operating system for IBM PCs).   Also,  if there are revenues flowing to an LDC in support of a worthy cause, what is to prevent those funds from being diverted to local warlords and the other powers that be?  This is the unglamorous but necessary part to consider.  It wasn't discussed at all.  In my opinion, making light of the political economy issues and treating this as mainly a technology problem is a mistake.

2.  While the Gates Foundation has a huge budget, how much wealth are Bill and Melinda retaining for themselves and their family?  I don't know the answer to that but I suspect the number is also huge and likely dwarfs the Gates Foundation endowment.  Netflix touts this video as a documentary, but it readily could be interpreted as a Bill Gates promotion, getting unwitting viewers to regard Gates as a philanthropist rather than as a robber baron, with Microsoft in the mid to late 1990s the evil empire.  Since I haven't yet watched the other episodes, I don't know how much of that history will be reviewed in the video.  But even if the history is shown, will the case be made that while Bill Gates may have changed his tune its possible that he's the same guy but now is cagier at marketing his image?  At the least, it seems to me that possibility should be explored.

3.  I can't help but think that a good deal of Gates' wealth is a consequence of tax cuts put in place during Reagan's time and thereafter.  Marginal tax rates on very high incomes came down dramatically.  Whether you now favor Medicare for all or instead expanding the benefits of Obamacare to those in the population who are not currently covered, it will cost a lot of money to do either of these.  I honestly don't know how to consider the trade-off between improved healthcare for low income Americans and making investments to improve the health of those who live in LDCs.  I think there are some thorny ethical questions here in coming up with a good answer.  If it were government doing this, it would be a struggle to work through.  But with a private individual doing this, those thorny issues are avoided. It's almost as if the Gates Foundation has become its own sort of State Department.

Let me conclude on a lighter note.  The TV show The Big Bang Theory made the nerd personality entertaining to others.  Casting Bill Gates in the same light may be good entertainment as well and its certainly closer to the real life story.  Over the rest of this week I'll watch the other episodes and see for myself.  I expect that many of my friends will do likewise.