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A review by chamomiledaydreams
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire by Tim Schwab
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
I went into this book expecting a breakdown of billionaires as a concept, but I should have known from the title that it would revolve around Bill Gates specifically. I appreciated the book's premise, which explained how a debate about the existence of billionaires was curtailed by the argument that billionaires aren't inherently bad, because Bill Gates is such a good philanthropist.
This book is a response to that debate, disproving Bill Gates' benevolence through a series of chapters that address such varied topics as: sexism and misogyny within the Gates Foundation; foreign aid policies that disregard what people in another country actually want; Bill Gates' role in changing American education through Common Core; his tendency to privatize institutions and prioritize profit, from his preference for charter schools to his dedication to patent rights for vaccines and other medical inventions; and the history of eugenics as it relates to birth control.
This last topic was especially interesting to me, because it addressed how metrics for success (getting X amount of women on birth control) can be harmful to communities, when people aren't given a choice for the types of birth control they want and aren't given the same amount of resources for family planning, should they choose to have kids rather than go on birth control. (If the emphasis is on personal choice and on protecting families' rights to control their own futures, then why can the Gates Foundation choose which type of birth control X amount of people should go on?)
I listened to the audiobook and noticed a couple of odd editing moments that may have been glitches on my end. But those didn't bother me too much; the biggest challenge was holding large numbers in my head and visualizing the many heaps of statistics. I often wished that I could skim the text visually and remind myself of the specific person being described or the year that an event happened in. This book is full of so much information that it's difficult to retain it all, especially in an audio format. But any amount of learning on this topic is useful, so I replayed chapters when I needed to and pressed forward when I knew I wouldn't understand no matter how many times I relistened.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in debunking the myth of a good billionaire. While Tim Schwab focuses largely on Bill Gates and his use of money, many of the critiques about him tie back to critiques about billionaires and wealth more generally. Here is a quote from the conclusion that exemplifies this: "Is billionaire philanthropy the solution to inequality, or is it an emblem of inequality? Is Bill Gates even a philanthropist?" This book asks its readers whether we should praise people for trying to spend their money benevolently, when our attention would be better focused on wondering whether anyone should be allowed to accrue this kind of wealth in the first place. Should money really grant an individual this much power and influence, and wouldn't all of Bill Gates' wealth be better spent in more democratic ways?
This book is a response to that debate, disproving Bill Gates' benevolence through a series of chapters that address such varied topics as: sexism and misogyny within the Gates Foundation; foreign aid policies that disregard what people in another country actually want; Bill Gates' role in changing American education through Common Core; his tendency to privatize institutions and prioritize profit, from his preference for charter schools to his dedication to patent rights for vaccines and other medical inventions; and the history of eugenics as it relates to birth control.
This last topic was especially interesting to me, because it addressed how metrics for success (getting X amount of women on birth control) can be harmful to communities, when people aren't given a choice for the types of birth control they want and aren't given the same amount of resources for family planning, should they choose to have kids rather than go on birth control. (If the emphasis is on personal choice and on protecting families' rights to control their own futures, then why can the Gates Foundation choose which type of birth control X amount of people should go on?)
I listened to the audiobook and noticed a couple of odd editing moments that may have been glitches on my end. But those didn't bother me too much; the biggest challenge was holding large numbers in my head and visualizing the many heaps of statistics. I often wished that I could skim the text visually and remind myself of the specific person being described or the year that an event happened in. This book is full of so much information that it's difficult to retain it all, especially in an audio format. But any amount of learning on this topic is useful, so I replayed chapters when I needed to and pressed forward when I knew I wouldn't understand no matter how many times I relistened.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in debunking the myth of a good billionaire. While Tim Schwab focuses largely on Bill Gates and his use of money, many of the critiques about him tie back to critiques about billionaires and wealth more generally. Here is a quote from the conclusion that exemplifies this: "Is billionaire philanthropy the solution to inequality, or is it an emblem of inequality? Is Bill Gates even a philanthropist?" This book asks its readers whether we should praise people for trying to spend their money benevolently, when our attention would be better focused on wondering whether anyone should be allowed to accrue this kind of wealth in the first place. Should money really grant an individual this much power and influence, and wouldn't all of Bill Gates' wealth be better spent in more democratic ways?