In the News – Bill Gates on Capitalism, Baldness Research, and Malaria
Snippet from the article:
Capitalism means that there is much more research into male baldness than there is into diseases such as malaria, which mostly affect poor people, said Bill Gates, speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Global Grand Challenges Summit.
“Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives,” he said. “The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria.”
Read the rest at Wired — Bill Gates: capitalism means male baldness research gets more funding than malaria
Mr. Gates has said basically the same thing in years past… and it remains true. You can find the previous times he’s said it in 2012 and in 2009.
I hope he is broke and bald in his next life. Then, he will see if malaria or balding cause more suffering.
Malaria currently causes over 1 million deaths a year and is one of the world’s leading cause of morbidity as well as mortality. In 2010 alone. the World Health Organization – based on reporting data on documented cases, estimated that there were 219 million cases of malaria resulting in 660,000 deaths – mainly in children.
Dear Mr. Gates
We all got our own problems, and you appear unmoved by mine.
… just so we know where we stand.
If one person were making all the decisions for our planet then Bill Gates’s critique would have some merit. But since decision making is dis-aggregated and people are inconveniently grouped into families, companies and countries, such statements have dubious value. Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on BING since its inception. In case you don’t know, BING is pretty useless search engine and developed solely for MS to keep its foot in the search engine door. Why doesn’t MS scrap this white elephant of a project and donate its budget to the Bill Gates Foundation to promote malaria research?
Yet we still don’t have an effective “cure” for baldness. The problem with capitalism and drug research is that companies are incentivized to look for treatments that need to be taken long term i.e. drugs that don’t cure a disease state but rather just treat it and ameliorate its symptoms. It is much more profitable for them if their customers remain sick and dependent on a drug that is covered under a patent which allows them to jack up the price.