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为什么比尔盖茨的慈善事业是个问题
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philanthropy-misanthropy/
如果你学会看透盖茨的公关光环，你就会看到他的贪婪、傲慢和优越感。
蒂姆施瓦布 2023 年 11 月 22 日
比尔盖茨在新闻发布会上发表讲话，宣布一项提高人们对联合国可持续发展目标认识的计划。
在过去的二十年里，成千上万的新闻报道描述了比尔盖茨的慷慨。基本上每天，头条新闻都会提醒我们他的私人基金会的慷慨：这里一百万美元，那里十亿美元。对于我们大多数人来说，这些数字都是令人费解的——但它们也有效地让我们的大脑短路了。关于盖茨无私慈善行为的片面性叙述创造了一个危险的神话，误解了比尔盖茨的真实身份和他实际在做什么。
经过二十年的慈善捐赠，比尔盖茨仍然是地球上最富有的人之一。他拥有 1170 亿美元的私人财富（这是在他与梅琳达离婚后，梅琳达的银行账户如今超过 100 亿美元）。他还管理着盖茨基金会 670 亿美元的捐赠基金。他控制的 1840 亿美元总额超过了盖茨基金会目前工作的几乎所有贫穷国家的国内生产总值。
对盖茨的冷静分析表明，他不仅是一位慈善家和正直的人，而且也是一位囤积者和守财奴。相对于他巨大的财富，盖茨捐出的钱只是一小部分——他不需要这些钱，而且他永远不可能花在自己身上。所以问题是：为什么我们不去庆祝盖茨基金会捐赠的数百万美元，而不去质疑他没有捐赠的 1840 亿美元？为什么我们不问：为什么世界上最慷慨的慈善家一年比一年富裕？
正是这种矛盾定义了盖茨，他是世界上最容易被误解的人之一。我们对盖茨的了解，或者自以为了解的大部分信息都来自盖茨本人——从他的基金会资助的研究、它赞助的智库、它承销的新闻，以及盖茨已经扩充到 11 个的扩音器。可以说，盖茨慈善生涯中最有效的方面是它的公关。而且，可以说，盖茨基金会最大的受益者是比尔盖茨本人。
盖茨基金会强烈宣称其“底线是拯救生命”，比尔盖茨也将其描述为他的北极星。 2021 年，当 CNN 询问他是否会加入杰夫·贝佐斯、理查德·布兰森和伊隆·马斯克等亿万富翁的行列，参与太空导弹竞赛时，盖茨大张旗鼓地表示自己置身事外：“直到我们能够消除疟疾和肺结核，以及所有这些在贫穷国家如此可怕的疾病之前，这将是我全部的关注点……我确实希望富人能找到方法，将他们的财富回馈给社会，产生巨大的影响。显然，他们有技能。他们不能，也不应该，想把财富全部花在自己身上。”CNN 从盖茨基金会获得了数百万美元的慈善捐款，但它并没有质疑盖茨声称的道德权威或亿万富翁的良好作风。如果它从事真正的新闻工作，它至少会提供背景信息。
例如，让观众了解盖茨在自我致富和财富积累上花费了多少时间和精力，这似乎很重要。通过专注于气候的投资基金“突破能源”，盖茨向一家名为斯托克的火箭公司投资。此外，他还拥有豪华酒店四季酒店的多数股权，据报道，他是全美最大的私人农田所有者。最近，盖茨随意押注 5 亿美元做空特斯拉，公开承认这只有一个目的：赚钱。
对于一个公开宣称自己“全心全意”帮助全球穷人的人来说，盖茨似乎也花了大量时间接受自我吹嘘的采访——通常是与他的私人基金会资助的新闻媒体进行的采访。在接受盖茨基金会数百万美元资助的 BBC 采访时，他再次回答了一些关于他是否有进入太空的野心的问题，并借此机会宣传他在地球上的慈善工作。盖茨指出，只需 1,000 美元就可以挽救一个孩子的生命，这与他多年来一直宣称的类似说法如出一辙。从某种程度上来说，将盖茨的数据分析针对他自己的财富似乎非常公平。根据盖茨自己的数据，如果他捐出这笔钱，他的 1840 亿美元财富可以挽救 1.84 亿人的生命。
这个计算，就像盖茨的许多“数字人”套路一样，纯属空谈。但无论你如何削减数字，盖茨的巨额财富都可以以深远的方式帮助世界，例如，如果将其重新分配给穷人作为现金礼物。这不可能通过盖茨基金会的父亲最了解情况、最关心
盖茨的慈善模式是官僚慈善的典型代表。盖茨对赋予穷人权力不感兴趣，他感兴趣的是强加他的解决方案。追踪盖茨基金会的资金可以证实这一点。该基金会近 90% 的慈善资金流向了位于富裕国家的组织，而不是他声称要服务的贫穷国家。别介意盖茨基金会的网站上充斥着微笑的有色人种穷人的图片；实际上，盖茨模式是资助全球北方的白领机构，以解决全球南方那些穿着达西基、罩袍、纱丽和坎加斯的人的问题。
如今，越来越多的盖茨预期受益者批评他弊大于利，有些人明确要求他停止帮助。《科学美国人》的一篇专栏文章的标题是“比尔盖茨应该停止告诉非洲人非洲人需要什么样的农业”，该文章由非洲粮食主权联盟的 Million Belay 和 Bridget Mugambe 撰写。从撒哈拉以南非洲的农民组织到全球公共卫生专家，再到美国的公立学校教师，批评者指出，盖茨的慈善运动机会成本高昂，而且留下了巨大的附带损害。
没有人选举或任命盖茨领导世界——在任何话题上。盖茨只是宣称自己拥有巨额财富，以夺取权力。他已经把手放在世界的杠杆上，试图根据他自己狭隘的新自由主义意识形态重塑我们如何养活、治疗和教育穷人。这位微软创始人甚至在他的慈善事业中面临长期存在的破坏性垄断权力的指控，因为他已经插上了自己的旗帜，并试图接管疟疾研究和健康指标等领域。
很少有词比“寡头政治”更能描述这种权力模式——最富有的人拥有最大的发言权。没有人比盖茨为使寡头政治正常化和制度化所做的贡献更大。盖茨将他的政治金钱活动打上慈善的幌子——而不是游说或竞选捐款——从而获得了税收优惠、无尽的赞誉和公众的掌声。慈善事业对我们的“优秀亿万富翁”来说非常非常好。
杰夫·贝佐斯、马克·扎克伯格和其他数百名亿万富翁都没有忘记这个教训，他们承诺追随盖茨的脚步，通过慈善事业将他们庞大的私人财富转化为广泛的政治权力，无论是重塑气候政策、重塑美国公立学校，还是影响我们如何监管人工智能的辩论。这使得我们其他人也掌握这一教训变得更加重要。我们让盖茨、贝佐斯和扎克伯格变得非常富有，现在我们又让这些人通过慈善事业将他们的财富转化为享有税收特权的政治权力。这些是我们也可以取消的选择。但要做到这一点，我们必须学会看穿公关光环。
当超级富豪从事慈善事业时，它不仅会扰乱我们的认知，还会扰乱我们的人性。桌上的金钱诱惑我们陷入危险的目的证明手段的逻辑，在这种逻辑中，我们专注于通过私人财富可以创造的巨大公共利益，而忽略了创造私人财富所造成的已知危害，或它所产生的反民主力量，或手头的替代方案——最简单的，通过税收而不是慈善来重新分配亿万富翁的财富。
更多关于比尔盖茨的信息
比尔盖茨给富人捐款（包括他自己）
蒂姆施瓦布盖茨之家的倒塌？
“慈善”一词源自希腊语，意为热爱人类。慈善捐赠是一种爱的行为，而不是权力的行使。捐钱不应该放大统治社会的权力不对称，而应该瓦解它们。这就是为什么在很多方面，盖茨更应该被描述为一个厌世者——如果他不憎恨他的同胞，那么他肯定认为自己是高人一等的。盖茨无视他声称要服务的穷人的愿望、需求、权利、尊严、智慧和才能，这说明他从根本上是用殖民主义的眼光来经营他的慈善帝国。这凸显了他所能取得的成就的生存极限，也解释了为什么盖茨基金会的成就如此之小。
这并不是说盖茨的意图不好，也不是说他的慈善干预从未帮助过任何人。显然，盖茨基金会捐赠的数百亿美元有时确实帮助了人们，是的，挽救了生命。但这些胜利充其量也应该被看作是乌云密布中的一线希望。在某种程度上，我们应该明白，旨在实现真正的人类进步——平等、正义、自由——的人道主义要求我们挑战不负责任的权力和不合法的领导人，而不是崇拜他们。这意味着比尔·盖茨是一个问题，而不是解决方案。
在即将到来的选举中，我们的民主和基本公民权利的命运取决于选票。
如果唐纳德·特朗普获胜，2025 计划的保守派设计者正计划在各级政府中将他的威权主义愿景制度化。
我们已经看到了一些让我们既感到恐惧又谨慎乐观的事件——在整个过程中，《国家报》一直是抵制错误信息的堡垒，也是大胆、有原则的观点的倡导者。我们敬业的作家与卡玛拉·哈里斯和伯尼·桑德斯坐下来接受采访，揭穿了 J.D. 万斯肤浅的右翼民粹主义诉求，并讨论了民主党在 11 月获胜的道路。
在我们国家历史的这个关键时刻，像这样的故事和你刚刚读到的故事至关重要。现在比以往任何时候都更需要清醒和深入报道的独立新闻，以理解头条新闻，并将事实与虚构区分开来。今天捐款，加入我们 160 年的传承，向权力说真话，提升基层倡导者的声音。
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蒂姆·施瓦布 (Tim Schwab) 是《比尔盖茨问题：清算亿万富翁神话》一书的作者。
Bill Gates speaks during a press conference announcing a a plan to increase awareness of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.Thousands of news stories have profiled Bill Gates’s generosity over the last two decades. Essentially every day, headlines remind us of his private foundation’s largesse: a million dollars here, a billion dollars there. These are mind-bending sums for most of us—but they have also effectively short-circuited our brains. The one-sided storytelling about Gates’s selfless philanthropy has created a dangerous mythology that misunderstands who Bill Gates really is and what he is actually doing.
After two decades of philanthropic giving, Bill Gates continues to be one of richest people on the planet. He boasts a private fortune of $117 billion (and that’s after his costly divorce from Melinda, whose bank account today exceeds $10 billion). He also oversees the Gates Foundation’s $67 billion endowment. The combined $184 billion he controls surpasses the gross domestic product of virtually every poor nation in which the Gates Foundation works today.
A sober analysis of Gates shows he is just as worthy of the titles of hoarder and miser as he is philanthropist and mensch. Relative to his vast wealth, Gates is giving away a tiny amount of money—that he doesn’t need and that he could never possibly spend on himself. So the question is: Instead of celebrating the million-dollar gifts his foundation donates, why aren’t we interrogating the $184 billion that Gates isn’t giving away? Why aren’t we asking: How is it that the world’s most generous philanthropist is becoming richer and richer, year over year?
It’s the kind of contradiction that defines Gates, one of the most misunderstood people in the world. Much of what we know about Gates, or think we know, comes from Gates himself—from the research his foundation funds, the think tanks it sponsors, the journalism it underwrites, and the megaphone Gates has cranked up to 11. Arguably the most effective aspect of Gates’s philanthropic career has been its PR. And, arguably, the single biggest beneficiary of the Gates Foundation has been Bill Gates, himself.
The Gates Foundation ferociously claims that its “bottom line is the lives saved,” which Bill Gates also describes as his North Star. Asked by CNN in 2021 whether he would be joining fellow billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk—in their missile-measuring race into outer space, Gates made a big show of staying above the fray: “Until we can get rid of malaria and tuberculosis, and all these diseases that are so terrible in poor countries, that’s going to be my total focus.… I do hope that people who are rich will find ways to give their wealth back to society with high impact. Clearly, they’ve got skills. They can’t, or shouldn’t, want to consume it all themselves.”CNN, which receives millions of dollars in charitable donations from the Gates Foundation, did not challenge Gates’s claimed moral authority or good-billionaire routine. If it were engaged in real journalism, it would, at the very least, have offered context.
For a guy who publicly claims that his “total focus” is helping the global poor, Gates also appears to devote considerable time to sitting for self-aggrandizing interviews—often with news outlets that his private foundation funds. Talking to BBC, the recipient of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, he once again took softball questions about whether he had ambitions to go into space, using the opportunity to trumpet his philanthropic work on Earth. A child’s life can be saved for only $1,000, Gates noted, echoing similar claims he has made for years. It seems more than fair, at a point, to aim Gates’s data analysis at his own wealth. By Gates’s own figures, his $184 billion wealth could save 184 million lives—if he gave that money away.
This calculation, like much of Gates’s “numbers guy” routine, is pure pablum. But however you cut the numbers, Gates’s vast wealth could help the world in far-reaching ways, for example if it were redistributed as cash gifts to the poor. That can’t happen through the Gates Foundation’s father-knows-best, look-at-me brand of bureaucratic philanthropy. Gates isn’t interested in empowering the poor; he’s interested in imposing his solutions. Following the money from the Gates Foundation confirms this. Nearly 90 percent of the foundation’s charitable dollars go to organizations located in wealthy nations, not the poor countries he claims to serve. Never mind that the Gates Foundation’s website is inundated with the images of smiling poor people of color; in practice, the Gates model is funding white-collared bodies in the Global North to fix those wearing dashikis, burqas, saris, and kangas in the Global South.
A growing group of Gates’s intended beneficiaries today criticize him as doing more harm than good, and some have explicitly asked him to stop helping. “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need,” noted the headline of an op-ed in Scientific American, authored by Million Belay and Bridget Mugambe from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. From farmer organizations in sub-Saharan Africa to public health experts around the globe to public school teachers in the United States, critics cite the high opportunity costs of Gates’s charitable crusades and the vast collateral damage they leave behind.
o one elected or appointed Gates to lead the world—on any topic. Gates simply asserted his vast wealth to take power. He has put his hands on the levers of the world, trying to remake how we feed, medicate, and educate poor people according to his own narrow neoliberal ideology. The Microsoft founder even faces long-standing allegations of destructive monopoly power in his philanthropic ventures, as he has planted his flag and sought to take over fields like malaria research and health metrics.
There are few words that better describe this model of power—where the richest guy gets the loudest voice—than “oligarchy.” And no one has done more to normalize and institutionalize oligarchy than Gates. By masking his money-in-politics efforts under the banner of charity—instead of, say, lobbying or campaign contributions—Gates commands tax benefits, endless accolades, and public applause. Philanthropy has been very, very good to our “good billionaire.”
This lesson has not been lost on Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of other billionaires who have pledged to follow in Gates’s footsteps, turning their vast private wealth into expansive political power through philanthropy, whether it is remaking climate policy, reshaping American public schools, or influencing the debate over how we regulate AI. That makes it all the more important that the rest of us also master this lesson. We have allowed Gates, Bezos, and Zuckerberg to become obscenely wealthy and now we are allowing these men to turn their wealth into tax-privileged political power through philanthropy. These are choices we can also un-make. But to do so, we must learn to see past the PR halo.
When the super-rich engage in charity, it has a way of not just scrambling our cognition, but also our humanity. The dollars on the table tempt us into a dangerous ends-justifies-the-means logic in which we focus on the enormous public goods that can be created through private wealth and ignore the known harms caused in its creation, or the antidemocratic power it engenders, or the alternatives at hand—most simply, redistributing billionaire wealth through taxation instead of philanthropy.
More on Bill Gates
Bill Gates Gives to the Rich (Including Himself)
TIM SCHWAB The Fall of the House of Gates?
The word “philanthropy,” from the Greek, means lover of humanity. A charitable gift is meant to be an act of love, not an exercise of power. Giving away money is not supposed to magnify the asymmetries in power that govern society but to collapse them. And this is why, in many respects, Gates might be better described as a misanthrope—if he does not hate his fellow human, then he certainly views himself as superior. Gates’s disregard for the wishes, needs, rights, dignity, intelligence, and talent of the poor people that he claims to be serving speaks to the fundamentally colonial lens through which he executes his charitable empire. It highlights the existential limits of what he can accomplish, and it explains why the Gates Foundation has achieved so little.
It’s not that Gates isn’t well intentioned, or that his charitable interventions have never helped anyone. Clearly, the tens of billions of dollars the Gates Foundation has given away have helped people at times and, yes, saved lives. But these wins should be viewed, at best, as a thin silver lining in a very dark cloud. At some point, we should understand that humanitarianism aimed at real human progress—equality, justice, freedom—requires us to challenge unaccountable power and illegitimate leaders, not worship them. And that means Bill Gates is a problem, not a solution.
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Tim Schwab is the author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.
