Bill Gates: The Entrepreneur or the Philanthropist

Well, today I did something I hadn't done in a while. I made a bold claim that I cannot back up with data, but which seems right to me in intuition. I was talking to students about the crucial role that average labor productivity has in increasing living standards, and I told them the various things that make workers more productive: capital, human capital, technology, land and resources, institutions. Then I told them that entrepreneurship and management are actually critical things. I told them the story about how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak raised money for the Apple by selling blue boxes door to door to college students and to the mafia. (I really hope it is true that they sold those things to the mob. I love that part of the story. Let's just call it apocryphal and move on). In those early days, it was not at all clear that they were on to something. Jobs was making promises he couldn't realistically keep, and it was so bad at one point, that the third member of the founding Apple corporation sold his stock to Wozniak and Jobs to get out. (Boy, talk about remorse! I'm sweating over the foregone profits from selling my house if I lower the price, and I think of this guy!).

But in the end, the general vision was dead on. The consumer surplus generated by the personal computer has been substantial. It's effect on living standards, may not be understood fully for a long time. But I made the rather bold statement that there is probably no other person in history who has done more for living standards globally or nationally than Bill Gates. In fact, I suspect that his vision to put a personal computer on every desk in the country has done far more to increase living standards in the world than his philanthropy projects will ever have. I'll be happy to admit I was wrong on it, but I doubt that I am wrong on that.