His third point, "Saving lives leads to overpopulation," is a weird straw man. I've never heard of anyone ever suggesting letting suffering children die as some way to keep the population low. He brings up Malthus as another straw man.
I'm not sure the point he's trying to make. To stop people from stopping people from saving people's lives? I think he's trying to suggest that the planet has too many people on it but that shouldn't stop us from saving people's lives. I know a lot of people who consider the planet overpopulated and I've never heard of anyone suggesting letting babies die would help, let alone consider it remotely human.
He seems to conclude educating women and making birth control available helps most. Why not just make that point? I feel like he's trying to imply those who disagree with him or agree with Malthus are tantamount to baby-killers.
On another (lighter) note, since dromedaries are camels too, calling the "camel world" a "bactrian world" would be more clear. The fun mnemonic for camel names is that the Dromedary has one hump and the Bactrian has two, like the first letters of their names, 'D' and 'B', turned sideways.
EDIT: Moreover, these statements are at odds, or at least need more explanation to connect them.
"It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too."
and
"Human beings are not machines. We don’t reproduce mindlessly. We make decisions based on the circumstances we face."
The first point suggests people have extra babies in anticipation of some of them dying before adulthood. The second implies they would target a certain number to reach adulthood, which would not itself lead to overpopulation. What would lead to overpopulation on a broad scale would be individuals benefiting from more children than the planet would, which is more like a tragedy of the commons.
If people decide based on circumstances, then they wouldn't have too many children for whatever their values decide, independent of child mortality. They'd have the right number. If they are having the right number for themselves, then food and medicine wouldn't affect their target number of children.
Bringing up food and medicine is a red herring. There may be a myth (which they don't establish), but it's irrelevant to the point made in that section: increase education and birth control. It confuses unrelated issues and paints people concerned with population as ignorant and cruel.
It's not clear to me where their logic suggests I should contribute resources. Should I favor food causes over education causes, the other way around, a mix, or neither?
I remember raising money for a UN programme that provides neonatal care to African mothers. The programme has an excellent track record of reducing infant mortality in newborns' first thirty days, when they are most vulnerable.
A common form of pushback I received was along the lines of "why save them now if it just leads to them starving later." I even had one Pacific Northwest environmentalist openly challenge the programme's net benefit on environmental grounds, though most dressed it as a chicken-or-egg dilemma between neonatal support and general poverty reduction. Still, a spade is a spade - the concern that saving people now will put undue strain on finite resources tomorrow is real.
> why save them now if it just leads to them starving later
We can save them now and have a couple years to solve the starvation problem.
> the concern that saving people now will put undue strain on finite resources tomorrow is real.
Indeed, it is. But their land is not producing at 100% efficiency. It would be a problem if it were, but, since it's not, the population that it can sustain is much larger than what it sustains now.
Rather strange and confused comment. Many people have expressed concern "Saving lives leads to overpopulation". It is a common concern of donors[1] and this view seems to be particularly common among those primarily concerned about sustainably and climate change[2][3]. You are simply unaware of the complaints that health campaigners in the developing world, like Bill Gates, actually face.
You appear to be simply grasping at straws so that you can find fault with Bill Gates.
I have heard people worry that since starving people seem to already have a lot of kids, if we send food aid, they'll just have even more kids and then there still won't be enough food. It's one of the things people use to rationalize that people who are in trouble somehow got themselves there and/or deserve it.
It's not a straw man. This is a common question that people have, but you may not have heard it voiced publicly, because people are worried about saying it out loud. Here's a perfect example:
Unfortunately, when you ask important but controversial questions, people tend to simply jump on you for "lacking compassion and humanity". Sometimes the most uncomfortable discussions are the most important to have.
I think we should resist the malthusian overpopulation argument in any form. Resource scarcity cannot be considered a problem when waste is such a major component of our economy. Radically uneven development, maybe, but not scarcity.
I'll bite. I believed it. Not only did I believe it until I read this letter, I thought Gates Foundation was doing an unintentional long-term disservice to the world by saving so many lives that overpopulation in the remote parts of the world will lead to more suffering due to starvation/hunger, poverty, and depression.
If X% of children in villages in Ghana are currently starving, how will raising that to 2X% starving-but-inoculated children help the world? I was never able to get that question answered sufficiently well. My background is in Econ and Comp Sci so I have a pretty good understanding of the impact of foreign aid. For the past decade, I've preferred the aid to be technological and infrastructural in nature instead of medical because I presumed that addressing the health needs of the existing population was merely plugging a hole on a broken dyke.
I really don't think she was calling me a baby-killer but rather questioning my faulty assumptions. I had made the same mistake that many others make when looking beyond their own monkey circles - that even people with little education make rational decisions about their lives, they're not mindless machines pushing out kids because that's what tradition or society demands. I never considered that the mothers in Ghana would have fewer children if earlier ones survived.
I assumed that because they are poor, did not have access to birth control, and were trying to maximize their long-term happiness, they would have as many kids as possible to maximize the chances of at least a few of them becoming successful. If you have two kids, both might be unemployed. If you have 12, maybe two of them will get good jobs and take care of you in the future. While this is great for the mother if two kids are successful, the other ten will end up repeating what she did and the cycle will continue ten-fold. I honestly believed that malaria was nature's way of minimizing long-term suffering.
There were too many faults in my assumption and I believed each of the myths up to a certain extent. My beliefs were not necessarily baseless, they were just completely out of date. I have a very hard time believing UN reports because of politics, corruption, and self-preservation interests of bureaucracy. However, I see no reason to assume Gates Foundation having any malevolence, especially since they're literally giving away their own money to improve the world long-term. So when they said my assumptions are in fact myths, I allowed them the chance to change my mind and by the end of the letter, I was cursing at myself for being so thick and wrong.
In addition to EFF, Wikipedia Foundation, and other tech causes, my future donations will also go to health/medical causes thanks to this single letter.
EDIT: If you want to know what REALLY blew me away, it was the single comparison shot of Mexico City 1986 vs 2011. My cousins in Mumbai grew up in the slums and now they post photos of their new [car|clothes|apartments] on Facebook. They were the kids bathing on the street and they weren't alone. Almost all of their friends are now working for multinationals in Delhi or Mumbai and most of them are doing better than their parents. An entire generation of slum-dwelling children have their own bathrooms, kitchens, and access to unlimited knowledge, technology, and medicine. I assumed that more people meant more slums. I did not realize that it could be fewer slums and more apartments.
There's a common idiom about progress that goes along the lines of "we always overestimate what can be done in the next 5 years and always underestimate what can be done in 10." (Though sometimes the first part is 1 year or 2 years.) This is especially true when it comes to long term socio-economic development. Look at the South Korea portrayed on the TV show "M.A.S.H.", that's the South Korea of the 1950s, and to some extent it was still a common view of South Korea when the show aired in the late '70s and early '80s. But from 1980 to 1990 South Korea's GDP tripled, and from 1990 to 2000 it more than doubled, and it did so again from 2000 to 2010. Today the people in South Korea are not just richer, per person, than Americans were in 1950 they are richer than Americans were in 1980, when M.A.S.H. was on the air. That sort of thing is very difficult to conceptualize, because humans are just generally not good at understanding geometric growth.
But the same trends are happening elsewhere. Mexico, for example, is becoming wealthier. If they can sort out their huge political and security problems in their country then they can easily join the developed world soon. The same goes for Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and China. And a decade from now there will be yet more countries who will have moved into firing distance of becoming a developed country too, and even more countries moving out of poverty and into the developing world as well. In 2050 there are many parts of the world that we will put in the same mental bucket of development status as the US/Europe et al today, places like Morocco, the Philippines, even Nigeria.
One of the problems people often have with history is lack of perspective and cultural bias. People can be exposed to countless portrayals of historical poverty and lack of development in America's past, for example, and yet still fail to draw a line of similarity to undeveloped or developing parts of the world today. Those people aren't so different from us, if given a chance they can do amazing things.
The point is well made - if raise the survival rate it quickly lowers the birth rate, because parents are no longer gambling against unknown but seemingly low odds of children making it past the age of 5. But it has to be backed up by enlightenment of the type mentioned in the article. The work also has to tackle patriarchial societies, child brides and superstitious beliefs. There are a lot of women still suffering under the classification of being a chattel in this world. Perhaps it is a generational thing, and solving child mortality is the first step in bequeathing a generation with better education and thus a rollback of barbaric practices.
I just added the "EDIT" section before I saw your question. That was what made me start questioning my beliefs. Here's a few things the letter said that eroded away the assumptions I had built regarding:
POVERTY:
> There are still slums and pockets of poverty, but by and large when I visit there now I think, “Wow, most people who live here are middle-class. What a miracle.”
> There is a class of nations in the middle that barely existed 50 years ago, and it includes more than half of the world’s population.
AFRICA:
> “Sure, the Asian tigers are doing fine, but life in Africa never gets better, and it never will.”... Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa.
> The percentage of children in school has gone from the low 40s to over 75 percent since 1970.
AID:
> Also remember that healthy children do more than merely survive. They go to school and eventually work, and over time they make their countries more self-sufficient. This is why I say aid is such a bargain.
> Here is a quick list of former major recipients that have grown so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Botswana, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius, Botswana, Morocco, Singapore, and Malaysia
The above one made me realize I can think of foreign aid like student loans. I needed the financial aid to afford college education. My loans are now paid off and I am significantly better off thanks to them.
CORRUPTION:
> Suppose small-scale corruption amounts to a 2 percent tax on the cost of saving a life. We should try to reduce that. But if we can’t, should we stop trying to save lives?
> On the other hand, four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for corruption, and to my knowledge no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down or its highways closed.
Basically, don't throw the baby away with the bathwater.
> The horror stories you hear about—where aid just helps a dictator build a new palace—mostly come from a time when a lot of aid was designed to win allies for the Cold War rather than to improve people’s lives. Since that time, all of the actors have gotten much better at measurement. Particularly in health and agriculture, we can validate the outcomes and know the value we’re getting per dollar spent.
This was another big seller for me. Gates is brilliant and everyone who has ever worked with him ends up calling him the smartest guy they know. It was naive of me to think that he didn't have measures in place to measure the impact of his investments and make sure waste was minimized.
And then pretty much everything in Myth #3. I was a fool.
As a firm believer that overpopulation won't be solved by throwing money at it, and that the people who are having children are the ones who shouldn't, I see most of this as irrelevant. Of course money solves poverty in the short term, no one should be surprised by that. But notice how he keeps comparing one generation with only the previous, and never making long-term assertions.
Besides, I doubt Gates can go from the CEO of Bad Guys Corp. (among the companies with the most evil business practices in history, up there with Nestle) to Superman just because he has always been a modern Robin Hood, establishing an OS monopoly to give our money to the poorest. I'd expect some public guilt or something. I'll keep taking whatever his foul mouth says with an enormous grain of salt until he explains his post-MS enlightenment and endorses Linux.
Oh come on. Microsoft's "evil" amounted to giving the competition a few kicks in the ribs while they were down. It was nasty and unsporting but let's keep things in perspective.
The comparison with Nestle would only be reasonable if a Windows 95 BSOD killed one of your children.
Even (especially?) geniuses compartmentalize. I applaud life saving and misery reduction regardless of who does it, and I'm not going to make my approval contingent on an apology for past wrongs.
The Gates foundation seems to be doing the best they can to model as far into the future as feasible so as to make best use of their resources. Models that propose death and misery as their means are rightly viewed with skepticism.
Sorry, making Windows ubiquitous on our PC's by monopoly position shenanigans does not equate, evil-wise, to the abuse of workers rights, health and our environment that many blue chip companies have participated in over the past 60 or so years - e.g. oil companies, food giants, mining corps.
While this letter is directed to the general public, Gates talks to many members of the global elites, some of whom may have privately voiced that concern.
Most people concerned about population are ignorant and cruel. Ignorant because they hold opinions based on vacuous news media accounts, and cruel because the underlying assumption is that us middle class western folk with our 2.2 kids are just peachy.
I remember my grandmother talking about these issues, because they were real to her in rural Ireland. She was one of 11 children. 2 siblings died before adulthood. Poor nutrition and no meaningful medical care led to all sorts of chronic health problems for folks in those days. (1910's)
It isn't all that weird to hear that. Peter Singer's paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" suggested that if we can help and we don't reduce ourselves to marginal utility we should help. For example, you can skip breakfast and save $5 for the poor. If we reduce ourselves to the point we can die from starvation, as in not eating for a week to save $100, that's not helping. He also mentions (I am paraphrasing) that if we know that by not helping them now can reduce population and decrease the famine severity, that might be a better route to take. Now Singer's point may be controversial, but that's the difference between a utilitarian and an denotologist (and an absolutist).
Much of development aid goes directly into health or food security, one way or another. It can be argued that any foreign aid, no matter how badly it is spent ends up saving lives. With vaccination programs it's just much more obvious and visible.
Gates rightly substitutes "foreign aid" with "saving lives", because that is the comparison that matters. When lifes are at stake, dickering about 1% of the federal budget sounds as ridiculous as it should.
If all human beings on earth used the resources as much as an average American does, it would need the resources of the 7 earth to meet the demand.
Poor country have larger populations, but they ain't using earth resources as much.
What Gates is trying to do, transfer the resources to poor people to make up for this disproportion of resources due to wealth possessed by the comparatively richer people.
It is sort of strange. The letter also talks about looking around and seeing a bunch of middle class people and assuming that no one is poor anymore. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. . .
Perhaps I extrapolated too much, but the line "There are still slums and pockets of poverty, but by and large when I visit there now I think, Wow, most people who live here are middle-class. What a miracle." just because this particular area had less poverty, doesn't mean there are less people living in poverty, it just means they may be more hidden. Actual stats would have been helpful.
Actual stats would have been helpful where? For Gates to make the conclusion that significant progress has been made? Because I am pretty well convinced that Bill sits around chewing through "actual stats" as a hobby and doesn't just pull this stuff out of his ass. If you're saying that actual stats would have made this illustration a little more compelling, then I also disagree, since the difference between Mexico City appearing to be one giant slum and having to go looking for extreme poverty is pretty compelling in my book.
Why do you (an armchair critic?) assume that the Gates, with direct data and experience, are wrong and overlooking reality with their statement? I'm pretty sure they have available decent data showing them overall progress and are not visiting one development and making a blanket extrapolation based on that.
My comment was that he makes a statement that says "I can't see poor people, which means they must not be here". I tried to clarify my comment and have an armchair critic in you disputing me, when you could have googled it to prove me wrong. But here you go, http://data.worldbank.org/country/mexico
Poverty as a % of population in mexico has increased from 47% to 52% according to the world bank.
I'm just suggesting that they be given the benefit of the doubt given their line and depth of work, and the understanding that you're taking the quote so literally. This piece about myths has been written to reach many people so it's trying to make a fair and convincing argument without detail that's too extreme.
Thanks for that World Bank link - nicely designed site and great data. Do you know why the graph isn't linked for more recent years? Is it speculative data?
I looked for a couple more sources and they had current poverty at about 44-45%. Wikipedia's Povery in Mexico page:
"Current figures estimate that at least 44.2 percent of the population lives under poverty."
And another page:
"Extreme poverty, on the other hand, clearly declined. Both the number and percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty fell between 2010 and 2012, from 13.0 million (11.3 percent) in 2010 to 11.5 million (9.8 percent) in 2012."
Beware: Poverty lines are often set as a percentage of the per capita GDP. So, in real terms, if the average buying power increase did not outpace the buying power increase of the richest few, poverty could increase, even as people are able to afford more.
The world bank data that you linked to seems to be using a relative poverty line.
I'm not sure the point he's trying to make. To stop people from stopping people from saving people's lives? I think he's trying to suggest that the planet has too many people on it but that shouldn't stop us from saving people's lives. I know a lot of people who consider the planet overpopulated and I've never heard of anyone suggesting letting babies die would help, let alone consider it remotely human.
He seems to conclude educating women and making birth control available helps most. Why not just make that point? I feel like he's trying to imply those who disagree with him or agree with Malthus are tantamount to baby-killers.
On another (lighter) note, since dromedaries are camels too, calling the "camel world" a "bactrian world" would be more clear. The fun mnemonic for camel names is that the Dromedary has one hump and the Bactrian has two, like the first letters of their names, 'D' and 'B', turned sideways.
EDIT: Moreover, these statements are at odds, or at least need more explanation to connect them.
"It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too."
and
"Human beings are not machines. We don’t reproduce mindlessly. We make decisions based on the circumstances we face."
The first point suggests people have extra babies in anticipation of some of them dying before adulthood. The second implies they would target a certain number to reach adulthood, which would not itself lead to overpopulation. What would lead to overpopulation on a broad scale would be individuals benefiting from more children than the planet would, which is more like a tragedy of the commons.
If people decide based on circumstances, then they wouldn't have too many children for whatever their values decide, independent of child mortality. They'd have the right number. If they are having the right number for themselves, then food and medicine wouldn't affect their target number of children.
Bringing up food and medicine is a red herring. There may be a myth (which they don't establish), but it's irrelevant to the point made in that section: increase education and birth control. It confuses unrelated issues and paints people concerned with population as ignorant and cruel.
It's not clear to me where their logic suggests I should contribute resources. Should I favor food causes over education causes, the other way around, a mix, or neither?