"No Power in the Market and No Voice in the System"

Posted June 11, 2007

Bill Gates’ Harvard commencement address is being circulated widely in Silicon Valley — and with good reason. He gave an outstanding speech (rather, he wrote an outstanding speech — he cannot deliver a speech to save his life).

In the tradition of commencement speeches, Gates reminded grads of their social obligations — a noblesse oblige for the 21st century social justice that is, conveniently, technology-driven.

Gates was inspired by George Marshall, whose Harvard commencement speech outlined his famous plan to rebuild postwar Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Gates saw a copy of Marshall’s speech on the wall of the waiting area prior to meeting with Marshall’s successor, Condi Rice.

Dr. Rice should keep her visitors waiting more often. In his
evocation of Marshall, Gates was thoughtful and eloquent. In the manner
of commencement speakers everywhere, he denounced complacency — this
time by asserting that complexity is the underlying foe. Even a guy as
smart as Gates cannot always tell the two apart however. To hear him
evoke the untold suffering of poor children is to recall Joseph
Stalin’s cynical smear that "a single death is a tragedy; a million
deaths is a statistic". Gates:

I left
Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world -
the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that
condemn millions of people to lives of despair. I learned a lot here at
Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure
to the advances being made in the sciences….

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries- but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

Imagine,
just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a
few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that
time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and
improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the
most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During
our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about
the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries
from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country.
Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I
had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids
each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked.
We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they
could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and
deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The
market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and
governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their
mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in
the system.

But you and I have both….

All
of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human
tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because
we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known
how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

Gates,
finally in possession of his college degree, closed with a challenge
that made him sound like a child of the sixties not a recipient of an
honorary Doctorate:

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. What for?

There
is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the
benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of
people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let
me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual
leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review
curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?…

When
you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in
talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what
the world has a right to expect from us.

In
line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the
graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep
inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of
your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to
make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing
power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same
interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don’t
let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It
will be one of the great experiences of your lives…

Now for a tasteless question: was Gates trying to outdo the outstanding "Stay hungry, stay foolish" speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford two years ago?

The
comparison is revealing. Bill and Steve have been competing with each
other in a very personal way for three decades — and the entire world
has benefited. Jobs still plays Athens to Gate’s Rome — always Thomas
Edison to Gate’s George Westinghouse.

Both are mellowing however, and they recently had interesting, even insightful things to say about each other when the Wall Street Journal got them on stage together at a conference near San Diego.

Jobs, playing the poet without effort, cited Paul McCartney “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead”.
These reflections were a far cry from his famous and accurate
assessment of Gates two decades ago. Watch it again to see how far both
men have come.