Mr. Gates Goes To Davos

Okay, it's not like we're going to upgrade to Vista in solidarity, but we did swell with a little hometown pride to read this about Bill Gates in this week's New Yorker:

That afternoon, [Wolfowitz] took part in a panel on foreign aid with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has an endowment of $30.6 billion; William Easterly, an economist at New York University who is a well-known skeptic of development policy; and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former bank official who is the President of Liberia. The discussion was held in a large auditorium, and every seat was taken. Gates and Easterly quickly got into an argument about the efficacy of aid programs. Easterly pointed out that research had failed to demonstrate any link between aid and economic growth. In the past forty-two years, he said, Africans have received five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars in aid, yet there has been no appreciable improvement in their living standards.

Gates, whose foundation has invested billions of dollars in programs and initiatives in Africa, many of which relate to public health, reacted angrily. He disputed Easterly’s statistics and declared, “When we put people on AIDS drugs, we don’t say to them, ‘Hey, unless you raise the G.D.P.’ ”—gross domestic product—“ ‘we have wasted our money.’ . . . I think life has value. . . . What happened with smallpox—that was aid work.”

We applaud Bill for injecting some common sense into the international aid/development discussion. And for representing the 206 like he did. Props, G.

In other New Yorker news, mental health blog Furious Seasons covers Jerome Groopman's story on bipolar kids (not currently online). Dawdy is against medicating the bejesus out of the troubled youth of today based on cutting edge diagnostic techniques like "parents read about it in a book, sounded just like Bobby." Because bipolar disorder is diagnosed from behavior -- there's no blood test, no brain scan, no hormonal level that can be used as a benchmark -- Groopman is concerned about diagnosis in kids becoming a fad, as ADHD did a while back, before we have longer-term results on how the medication affects their development. Dawdy is also concerned about what it means to label a three-year-old bipolar -- what are the long-term effects of growing up with that label attached? How rambunctious is that kid ever going to be allowed to be?