Fareed Zakaria continues his amazing series of interviews on his CNN GPS show with Bill Gates.
Like Warren Buffett, a close friend of Gates, Gates will give away almost all of his wealth over the next decades via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which focuses on global health and education initiatives.
Gates supports “some” inheritance taxes because we are all beneficiaries of the education and stability provided by the US infrastructure.
His preference for foreign development investment seems to be based on the idea that the need is much greater there, the return on the charity giving is much greater, reducing infant mortality wll *decrease* birth rates [this is a profoundly important observation that is well documented but poorly reported - many think helping the poor tends to increase births when this is false]. They talked about the book “The Bottom BIllion”.
On the future of computing and the Internet:
Shape of computers will change. VIrtual wallpapers, tablet computing.
The whole economy is using software simulation, which makes development less expensive.
China as largest broadband market – probably for the rest of the century. He seemed to think India was unlikely to catch up to China.
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He’s focusing more now on how to create visibility for issues like malaria prevention.
When asked how he’d be remembered – as a software pioneer or philanthropist – Gates didn’t answer but I think the answer is increasingly clear. Gates more than any other person has brought a new era of Innovative huge scale development work that could turn back the tidal wave of poverty in our generation. He’s helping to make it not only fashionable, but somewhat obligatory for the rich to pay a lot more attention to those in need.
