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Gates rejects idea of e-utopia Microsoft chairman says health care, not high tech, best route for aiding world's poor
Thursday, October 19, 2000
By DAN RICHMAN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Health care and literacy -- not computers -- are the most important ways to help the world's 4 billion poorest people, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said yesterday.
The remarks by the world's richest man, a confessed technophile whose creation of a software empire made him a multibillionaire, seemed to undercut the very essence of a three-day conference on the digital divide he was concluding on the Seattle waterfront.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, delivering the Creating Digital Dividends keynote speech yesterday in Seattle, said technology alone won't help the world's poor. Paul Joseph Brown/P-I The Creating Digital Dividends conference, sponsored by Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute and attended by some 300 representatives of high-tech companies, venture firms and governments, revolved around the thesis that technology can make both entrepreneurs and consumers out of people earning less than $1 a day.
"Let's be serious. Let's be serious," Gates said, sparring with moderator Scott Shuster , a Business Week editor. "Do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day? ... There are things those people need at that level other than technology. ... About 99 percent of the benefits of having (a PC) come when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit down and use it."
Gates is an ardent capitalist and technophile who also founded the $17 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He said the foundation puts 60 percent of its revenues into improving health and 30 percent into education.
It donated $30 million to a vaccination program in India last month and has committed more than $1 billion worldwide toward fighting disease and developing reproductive health care.
It was a difficult message for the technology-oriented audience to hear. But Gates -- relaxed and affable, with a candor and clarity he hasn't always shown -- didn't shy away from tackling the complex issue of how best to eliminate worldwide poverty, poor health and illiteracy.
Gates was asked whether the world shouldn't "lead with technology for economic development and watch health improve as a follow-on to that, as occurred here."
He answered, "One million people a year (in the U.S.) were not dying of measles when the microprocessor was invented."