2) I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.

3) I like the stuff I work on. You don't need a respite from work you like.

4) We wouldn't trust anyone else enough. We'd rather see if we can cook up some clever way of doing everything ourselves.

5) Write essays.

6) I haven't given up on painting. But the web has opened a window for writing essays that never existed before, so I decided I'd spend a couple years mostly writing.

Oh?

Anyone here go to UChicago? That was Rockefeller's philanthropy. How about CMU? Carnegie-Mellon. Who watched Square One as a kid? Also Carnegie & Mellon. Ever aspired to being a Nobel Laureate? Alfred Nobel, the person who got rich off dynamite. The math competitions I went to were sponsored by a variety of corporate charities. The Intel and Westinghouse science competitions are Intel and Westinghouse's charitable programs, respectively. Olin College was started by liquidating the Olin Foundation.

My high school was started with a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. I credit it with getting me interested in startups in the first place. It's now doing teacher training with a $500K grant from the Gates Foundation.

One of my mom's friends is involved with schools in Africa. She says that the Gates Foundation has made a massive difference over there. Children who would otherwise die from childhood illnesses are going to school, learning to read and write, and even learning how to use computers.

I think a better lesson to draw from history would be that attempts to distribute money are always fraught with unintended consequences, so tread carefully. However, you don't get to be a billionaire if you're not careful with money. Gates and Rockefeller and Carnegie don't need our advice on how to put their money to good use. I'd hardly say that Gates is "throwing away" his money.

(Paul Allen, OTOH - really, can you say that the Portland Trailblazers are worth more than saving 70 million kids from measles?)

7) Are my lips hurting your ass?

Perhaps the reason people reacted so violently is that they can imagine some reasonable arguments that sound like these. I.e. this is a case of people being made maddest by statements they worry might be true.

I think the volume of comments is at least partially because everyone reads them and thinks about them.

Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here?

Hardly, but given that it was his essays that brought many (most?) of us here to begin with, it's something we all have in common. So his essays generally get more attention. Furthermore, his essays tend to attract attention from all over, and visitor comments probably wind up on news.yc.

I guess with the iPhone a lot of the customers are first time apple customers, so they don't know how the system works.

Until Africa has the institutions necessary to support a free market, Gates's philanthropy (which actually is aimed more towards health and basic literacy than free computers) is much more useful than an Emerging Markets fund.

Many die-hard free-marketers don't realize this, but markets require significant institutional support before they even become workable, let alone efficient. You need private property rights. You need contract law. You need courts that enforce laws in a predictable, non-arbitrary way. You need literacy. You need a culture that believes that it's worth sacrificing today's pleasure for tomorrow's happiness. You need a rational belief that there will be a tomorrow, and you won't die from some random illness or machete-toting warlord in the meantime. You need transportation infrastructure to move goods and services between locations. You need a stable currency that's accepted by everyone you're likely to do business with and won't be hyperinflated away on a warlord's whim.

Africa has none of these.

So pouring any sort of money into Africa, whether it comes from charitable donations or a hedge fund, means pouring it down a black hole. There's nothing special about the private sector that makes it immune to this. Normally, private firms do better because ones that fail get replaced by ones that succeed. Well, fine. They'll all fail, as will all their replacements.

Gates is working at trying to supply the basic infrastructure necessary for a market economy to emerge. In order to have markets, you must have contracts and private property. In order to have contracts, you must have literacy. In order to have literacy, you must have education. In order to have education, you need a reasonable belief that you won't die next week from a random illness.

So the Gates Foundation starts the process there: ensure that people have a reasonable belief that they won't die next week. It finds villages that already have a reasonably stable food supply and are not in the middle of a civil war (those, for the moment, are beyond help unless you get the U.S. military involved). It then vaccinates the children, installs pumps for clean water, teaches them some basic sanitation rules like "don't shit upstream of your water supply", and so on.

Education only becomes realistic once children have a reasonable expectation that they won't die. Once they do, you can work on literacy. Once you have literacy you can try to change the institutions of the host country. More likely, you'd want to get some small-scale trade going among villages and between villages and the West. This is why the Internet is potentially so important over there - it lets African villagers bypass the corrupt warlords and governments above them.

But not before they have the basics down. It's meaningless to speak of an Emerging Markets fund going into many African countries. There's no market at all, let alone an emerging one.