Bill's Billions

[luckykaa]

Saw on Slashdot that Bill Gates is more admired than the Pope.  (Yes, I still read Slashdot).

Now, I have certain issues with the methodology - a telephone poll of 1000 people isn't going to give very accurate results.  I also have to wonder what exactly the Pope has done since he got the job.  But what struck me as odd was the discussion.  Manhy people thought he was only admired for his money.  Others believed that without him we wouldn't have home computers (seriously - without microsoft, someone else - Probably Steve Jobs - would have done very much the same).  But what seems very odd is how many people were unaware of his Philanthropic endeavours. 

It's not about the money.  He has donated billions to his foundation, but doing that is actually quite easy if you're a billionaire.  The real contribution is the reason the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation exists. 

Bill Gates was simply going to donate a hefty chunk of cash to the cause which would do the most good.  He couldn't.  They simply didn't offer the metric he was interested in.  All they were interested in was reducing overheads.  They were using the wrong metric.  Percent spent on administration is a factor but its only a contributory factor.  The real target is lives saved per dollar spent.  If by hiring more people, you can reduce purchase costs elsewhere, you're actually increasing efficiency by increasing admin costs. 

If other charities take on this approach, and find a way to maximise the good done, rather than secondary measures that affect it, we'll save a lot more lives than Bill's billions ever will.

Comments

[chess]

Problem is, it's easy to measure percentage on overheads, and hard to measure 'good done', even if you reduce it to 'lives saved per pound spent' (how do you define 'saved'? how do you know if they would have in fact been fine without the intervention?)