Bill Gates, Steven Pinker and Philip Galanes

Excerpts from conversation between Bill Gates, Steven Pinker and Philip Galanes over a lunch of pizza and salad. Published in New York Times dated Jan 27, 2018.

• You don’t want a tech company run by somebody in their 60s. At least I didn’t want to ... Bill Gates
• Mr. Gates readily acknowledged that the person he is today is not one he would have recognized when he was in his 20s and single-mindedly building Microsoft. “I was a zealot,” he said. “I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacations. I knew everybody’s license plate so I knew when they were coming and going. That was my life: doing great software.”
• Given this wealth and our value system, what’s the highest-impact way to give it back? Melinda and I chose global health as our biggest issue, and U.S. education as our second one. And we’ve surrounded global health with agriculture and sanitation, family planning, antismoking. So, it’s a broad definition ... BG
• For a young man in his 20s, writing software night and day may be the best way to add to human welfare ... BG
• We have to resist the temptation to say that the fantastic good that’s done by foundations and innovators takes governments off the hook ...  Steven Pinker
• The motto of the foundation is: “Every life has equal value.” But in truth, I want better things for my husband and my kids than for you ... Philip Galanes
• When we give ourselves over to the law, we want it to be executed impartially. We gain stability. But if you could get your son off, of course you’ll try ... BG
• Those under the influence of reason desire nothing for themselves that they do not desire for all humankind ... SP
• But reason is not a powerful part of human nature. Innately, we favor family over strangers, our tribe over other tribes. It’s only when we convince others of the right way to act — that we conclude that all lives have equal value ... SP
• There’s a tendency in journalism and political debates to assume that it’s easy to achieve a perfect society. But we have no right to expect perfection ... SP
• Why throw money at the developing world? They’re just going to have more babies and be just as poor ... SP
• I embrace more risk. Most philanthropists don’t take huge risks. If I didn’t have the success I had at Microsoft, I would never have the bullheadedness to embark on this project ... BG
• The person who invents an affordable and efficient toilet should be made a saint ... SP
• One of the biggest enemies of reason is tribalism. When people subscribe to an ideology, they suck up evidence that supports their preconceptions and filter out evidence that goes against them. And a move toward greater rationality would unbundle them and let evidence inform what the optimal policies ought to be. ... SP
• Innovation drives progress, not Washington ... PG
• Is AI going to proceed so quickly that work, which is something people worship, will suffer bad distributional effects, and people won’t know what to do? This is an unfortunate time for saying, “Take all your damn negative thoughts, and I’ll innovate away from them.” People are seeing difficulty with that argument ... BG
• There are certain things that governments are always going to do better than private innovators. Basic research, for instance ... SP
• All three sectors — philanthropy, which is about 2 percent of the economy; government, which is about 30 percent; and the private sector, which is the balance and largest by far — each have their role ... BG
• Disease elimination is something that runs against people’s general pessimistic outlook. It’s amazing to think that polio might be gone. That one is pretty near ... BG

With advancing age, enlightenment is natural especially for people with book reading habit. The winner is who gets this at an early age and doesn't intimidate juniors and respect their rights.

Wealth accumulation reflects one’s character

• Tax havens are shadowy and sleazy little countries and principalities such as the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein and Monaco.
• Low taxation countries like Switzerland, Singapore and Dubai assure secretive rich people of their privacy. 
• A tax haven exists to cheat sovereign states of their lawful incomes. 
• It is estimated that corporate tax avoidance costs governments $500bn a year while personal tax avoidance costs $200bn a year. This means that between $20-30 trillion of business transactions in various jurisdictions are sheltered from taxations. 
• Moody’s estimated that in 2016, giant American technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple were hoarding about $1.84 trillion cash in offshore havens. Clearly, they are avoiding taxes by bending the rules of the tax system. This is tax avoidance, which is not illegal for they are operating within the letter, but perhaps not the spirit of the law. 
• Tax evasion is just plain concealment of income and is a crime in all countries. 
• In 1980's, shaken up by many of its MBA graduates found wanting in ethical and moral values, the Harvard Business School made a course on “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” a core requirement. 
• Doing the ethics course is one thing but it is something else to be able to resolve the moral dilemmas of  “HBS’s ethical view of capitalism that derives its transformational view of money, in which the ability to accumulate wealth is a reflection of one’s character.”
• Market forces can be a potent driver for positive social change.
• The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
• Tax avoidance is as reprehensible as tax evasion. 
• Mauritius and Singapore are our two biggest sources of FDI.

Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune - Mahatma Gandhi

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