Bill Gates Asks Why ‘Technocrats’ Aren’t Fixing ‘Gameable’ U.S. Safety Net

Bill Gates views the world as “a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged,” says Rolling Stone (March 27).

In an interview transcript published by the magazine, Mr. Gates discusses income inequality, antipoverty efforts, agricultural progress, climate change, and his foundation’s push to end polio worldwide, to which it has committed a total of $3.3-billion.

While not dismissing the need for the government to do more to aid the poor in America—and possibly raise taxes to do it—Mr. Gates says the public safety-net system is “horrific” and needs fixing.

“It’s all high overhead, capricious, not well designed,” he tells the magazine. “Its ability to distinguish between somebody who has family that could take care of them versus someone who’s really on their own is not very good either. It’s a totally gameable system—not everybody games it, but lots of people do. Why aren’t the technocrats taking the poverty programs, looking at them as a whole, and then redesigning them?”

Other highlights from the interview:

• He elaborated on the prediction he made in his most recent annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that there will be essentially no poor countries by 2035, citing advances made in disease eradication, sanitation, and increased industry and agricultural production. “Assuming there’s no war or anything, we ought to be able to take even the coastal African countries and get them up to a reasonable situation over the next 20 years.”
• Mr. Gates blames the unrest and political climate in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and northern Nigeria for foiling his foundation’s efforts to eradicate polio globally, as vaccines and the Western organizations that provide them are often viewed with suspicion there, and the disease persists in those regions.
• He says a variety of energy sources, including nuclear power and geoengineering to extract energy from the ground, should be explored to slow climate change. Critics of such strategies, he says, argue that “it looks like an easy out, it’ll reduce the political will to cut emissions. If that’s the case, then, hey, we should take away heart surgery so that people know not to overeat.”

To read the interview, go to: rollingstone.com.