By Anthony Cody

What impact has Bill Gates had on the world since he launched the most wealthy tax-exempt foundation in the world? We finally have a book that takes this on, from a critical perspective. “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire” was written by journalist Tim Schwab. It delves a bit into Gates’ personal history, including his dubious association with Jeffrey Epstein, but the bulk of the book is focused on the many areas where the Gates Foundation holds sway.

The author begins with a chapter focused on the “lives saved” index the Gates Foundation uses to promote its impact. Schwab points out that the way we measure this impact is based on some big assumptions – and leaves aside consideration of the number of lives that might be saved with a different approach. Specifically, Gates believes that the way that drugs and vaccines are patented, and those patents protected, is the best way to deliver health-saving technologies to humankind. And following the pattern of his aggressive capture of the software market with Microsoft, he supposes that in order for research and development of new drugs to be incentivized, drug companies must be allowed to make obscene profits on their patented products. He works on complicated and often failing market subsidies and workarounds to then try to make these drugs available to the global poor. 

A second chapter takes on the touchy subject of Gates’ relationship with women. Schwab recounts many stories of Gates’ questionable passes at women who worked under him at Microsoft – Melinda French was one of them. And then the infamous friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which contributed to his break-up with his wife. 

One chapter dares to ask in what way Bill and Melinda Gates can even be considered generous, much less “the most generous people in the world,” as they are often portrayed. After all, with a personal fortune of around a hundred billion dollars in wealth, Gates could spend a million dollars a day for more than 200 years before using up the money – and that assumes the money is not invested and earning more, which, of course, it is. So by creating a tax-free “charity” to hold and invest a portion of his wealth (another $54 billion over and above the $100 billion in his private coffer), Gates gets to escape taxation on a large part of his wealth, which he is still able to direct in ways that enhance his power and reputation. While in the 1990s he boasted that he did not and would not own a private jet, he has one now, in spite of positioning himself as an expert on climate change. He boasts that he does not own a superyacht as many billionaires do, but instead he simply rents one for a million or two dollars a week. So the idea that his “giving” is generous must be questioned, since it does not reflect any meaningful sacrifice, and actually confers significant benefit to him.  

In his critique, Schwab points out the opportunity cost that is paid when Gates uses his money to privilege his priorities. In promoting a vaccine for the HPV virus, the foundation made the assumption that cancer screenings available in wealthier countries were impossible in poorer countries, so this made the HPV vaccine necessary. This would result in huge profits for drug companies Merck and GSK. But what would it cost if we instead invested the billions these vaccines would cost into health clinics instead? Many millions of dollars of public funds must be invested in these projects as well. There are always choices being made, and often the Gates Foundation plays an influential role by controlling the discourse and decision making processes. 

In agriculture, the Gates Foundation is a huge proponent of a technologically powered “Green Revolution” in Africa. They actively promote the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMO seeds in order to boost the output of African farmers. However, these strategies often have harmful impacts, and may actually increase poverty and debt for the farmers involved. Once again, there is a hegemonic approach to the field, with research, non-profit advocacy and journalism sponsored to advance the Gates agenda, and scorn heaped on alternative approaches such as agro-ecology. 

Schwab devotes a well-documented chapter to the field of education. He tells the tale of parent resistance to the Gate-sponsored InBloom data collection project, noting the key role played by Leonie Haimson. He also notes the marches teachers organized on the Gates Foundation’s headquarters back in 2014. 

Schwab also describes the dialogue I held with the Gates Foundation back in 2012. I wrote about Gates and the foundation’s role critically in numerous posts on my blog, which led to an invitation to engage in dialogue from a leader at the Gates Foundation. That resulted in a trip to Seattle, where I spent a day meeting with various teams from the Foundation’s education work. As Schwab reports, this meeting led to a series of five exchanges on our respective blogs, focused on key topics in education. As I explained to Schwab, in addition to trying to shift the Foundation’s understanding, I also wanted to help teachers understand what was happening to our profession, and the role the Gates Foundation was playing in these changes. (This dialogue, and many additional essays focused on the education work by the Gates Foundation, can be found in my book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation.)

In order to start our dialogue out on a positive note, I suggested we discuss “How do we build the teaching profession?” I offered real-world examples of teachers owning and striving to improve their classroom practice.

As we know, the Gates Foundation wanted to systemically monitor and measure learning so as to efficiently manage it, emphasizing the use of test scores to weed out “ineffective” teachers, so I suggested we discuss “How do we consider evidence of student learning in teacher evaluations?” Again, I pointed to places where teachers were getting timely feedback and reflecting with peers. I also shared research showing the ways that using test scores for this purpose was misguided and destructive.

They wanted to ignore the social and economic conditions of students affected by poverty and racism, and place schools and teachers in the role of saviors, promising that generational patterns of poverty would be broken through higher educational achievement. So I wrote “Can schools defeat poverty by ignoring it?” In this essay, I wrote about the many ways that poverty affrects student learning and the classroom environment, and pointed out the fundamental weakness of the foundation’s test-focused strategies.

I also felt there was a fundamental assumption in the work of the Gates Foundation that portrayed education as workforce development. So I addressed this by asking “What is the purpose of K-12 education?” 

The last question we tackled was focused on the role of the marketplace in education. I wrote this essay, which asked “what happens when profits drive reform?” I pointed out the link between test and punish strategies and the promotion of school choice, leading to increased privatization – and the misleading and destructive role data gathering plays in this regard. I pointed to the dangers of corruption and waste associated with public funding diverted to charter and private schools. We have seen this manifest, as documented in numerous reports from Carol Burris and the Network for Public Education.  I pointed out the ways this gives license to racial and economic segregation, as documented in this recent report from NPE: A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda

Of course, as an educator and writer, I have grappled with the influence the Gates Foundation has wielded in education for the past fifteen years. I have seen patterns of cooptation and the pursuit of hegemony, the way the Gates Foundation has paid for research and policy advocacy from official-sounding organizations like the National Council on Teacher Quality, or the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is then cited in news reports written by journalists whose work is underwritten by the Foundation, and then further presented as having grassroots support from teachers by way of Gates-funded astroturf projects.

In 2013, I saw my own work (criticizing the Gates-funded Common Core Standards) first recognized as excellent by the Gates-funded Education Writers Association, but then rejected the following year after they changed their rules to make bloggers ineligible for awards. 

The foundation’s role in sponsoring journalism ensures their version of reality is widely spread, through their rose colored glasses. The money flows in the millions to various publications and projects, often promoting what is termed “solutions journalism,” telling the good news stories of the great strides being made here and there, often as the result of the foundation’s interventions. 

What was remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, was to discover through reading the chapters on the Gates Foundation’s work on global health and agriculture that the same fundamental flaws appear again and again. In health, there is an over-reliance on vaccines, and a single minded pursuit of the eradication of polio. In the model advanced by Gates, drug companies must have their patent protection, and entitlement to huge profits that result from those intellectual monopolies – parallel to the monopoly enjoyed by Microsoft. The foundation has invested heavily in research, and created public-private partnerships that put them in the driver’s seat, even to the extent of having the right to vet potential leaders on research projects at public universities. 

The larger pattern that Schwab identifies is even deeper – that of wealthy white men using their power to make all sorts of decisions that impact our health, diet, education and economy. This regime is coming under fire, and it is about time. In his conclusion, Schwab notes:

“In every corner of Gates’s empire, we see his claimed subjects in revolt. We’ve seen parents, teachers and activists challenge Gates’s Common Core educational standards, successfully kill off the foundation’s hundred-million-dollar data surveillance project  in public schools, and march on the Gates Foundation’s headquarters in Seattle. We’re seeing a growing movement to “decolonize global health,” one that presents an existential challenge to how the foundation does business in health and medicine. We’re seeing farmers and farmer groups across Africa openly challenging Gates’s agricultural interventions and calling for the defunding of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.”

This book is highly readable, and the patterns of privilege it uncovers are galling, and striking in their repetition. There is a Gates Foundation template in use when an arena is targeted. This book is a valuable step toward a long-overdue project – holding Bill Gates and other billionaires accountable for their impact on our world, especially in perpetuating the poverty and dependence their charitable work is supposed to end.