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Articles: Business | Remarks of Bill Gates
- Mr. Venkata Ramanamurty Mallajosyula
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I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: 'Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end - because people just ... don't ... care.' I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing - not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: 'Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.' The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new - and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help. And so we look away.
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