I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away.
For example, if he has someone in charge of spending money on medical research, don't you think there is a point (a few billion) where they just don't know what else to spend money on? I mean, there are only so many medical researchers in the whole world.
Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish."
No, this isn't really true. The NIH's budget is 30 billion a year, and that funding is already incredibly competitive. Private universities, other government sources such as NSF, NASA, and DoE, and private institutions then in addition spend an amount that dwarfs that number. On top of all of that, the last 6 years have seen cuts, layoffs, and an enormous amount of work go unfunded in the life sciences.
Only about 16% of proposed NIH grants alone are funded each year- we can immediately see from that data that funding all NIH grants in just one year would probably take well over $100 billion.
The life scientists of the U.S. could find a use for Bill Gate's entire fortune in a few years. Not that dropping $80 billion on across the board medical research wouldn't be incredibly, enormously beneficial, but the infrastructure and manpower in the medical sciences are there to be able to absorb it and put it to use.
Have you talked to anyone who's been funded by the Gates Foundation? I have. It's rigorous, and very data-intensive. Whatever imaginary cache of research out there that might exist probably couldn't be qualified-up for a GF funding process.
I've done grant funding as well. People say they want money, but the minute you give them a deadline, they're gone, and they can't collect even the merest evidence required for due diligence.
If they magically funded all of the grants then there wouldn't be enough scientists to do all the work; there's nothing to say that you can't put in more than one proposal at a time.
Edit: well, of course everyone's salaries would go up since there would be so much more demand and no extra supply, but I doubt they could go up that much all at once; most of the money would still go unspent.
> Of course you can always just throw money away/at people, but it won't do any good. "Give a man a fish" vs. "teach a man to fish."
Yes, throwing fish at the poorest is the right thing to do. Malnourished children grow with diminished intellectual capacity. Then it is too late to teach them to fish.
Look at the recent US drought - were people wrong to have had children ten years ago? How were they to know that some areas of the US were going to be in severe multi-year drought?
Why is it different if you change "the US" to some other part of the world?
Have a read of "Too Poor To Farm" which explains some of the problems very poor people face, and explains some of the reasons why very poor people have children.
The best way to do that is to educate young girls so they grow up into women who don't want to just pump out kids. It happened in the West, it can work elsewhere.
> I bet Bill Gates has a hard time finding enough qualified people to wisely manage the money he is giving away.
That's hardly surprising. Managing money is investing, and wise investment requires a lot of skills, market information, and connections. There's only so many good investors out there.
I don't think managing a charity successfully and making savvy investment decisions are similar. Investing outside of angel investing/accelerators is fairly close to a zero sum game, and there are many more excellent opportunities from a societal investment perspective in charities than in investing.
Not investing as a whole is a zero sum game but specifically increased levels of investing sophistication and savvy.
Diminishing returns does apply to some problems, but there are enough researchers in most areas to justify investing hundreds of millions or billions, and for that matter you can fund research grants for students to expand the number of people in that field.
