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Bill Gates Wants 3 Political Parties: Republicans, Democrats, and Arithmetic

By on January 6, 2013 7:53 pm / 2 comments

 

In China all but one of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are engineers.—-The Economist, Nov. 19, 2011

      I had to watch a video conversation between Bill Gates and Thomas Friedman twice because during the first viewing I focused on their  jockeying for the commandant general position. Then, I discovered there are two versions of this conversation, so I had to watch each one of  those. At the New York Times website a short video conversation
(6:36) between “the Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman and Bill
Gates starts out with an ad and then goes to a full-screen close-up of Friedman. The video is introduced by this note: Bill recently read and reviewed “That Used to Be Us,” a new book on how to strengthen America’s economic competitiveness. Bill recently sat down with co-author Thomas Friedman for a probing conversation about the vitally important issues raised by the book.
     Gee, don’t you wonder who wrote that copy?
     Friedman announces, “We’re here talking about American competitiveness. . . .” Then he acknowledges Gates’ presence, saying, “You’re one of the first people I talked to after I wrote The World is Flat. . . .”
     At gatesnotes.com, a longer version of the conversation  (16:04) is billed America’s Future: A Conversation with Bill Gates and Thomas Friedman. It opens with Bill saying, “I’m talking today with Tom Friedman. . . about his book That Used to Be Us. ”
     Maybe this shows that Gates has more finesse at managing big egos, but he pretty much dominates the conversation, not allowing Friedman to interrupt.
      Friedman offers his  same stale claim: “We actually had a formula for success. We did get here in a certain way. We’ve gotten away from that formula and we have to get back to it.”  And then comes the grotesque gospel: As the world has gotten this hyperconnected. . . average is over. This is followed by typical Friedman boilerplate that education reform is the answer. He fails to supply details on how education can move into that Lake Wobegon territory where all the children are above average.
      Bill Gates’s big claim may surprise some of the ed reform doomsayers: There is more innovation taking place in this country still than in the rest of the world put together.
      Neither man responded to the other’s big claim and then Gates changed the subject with:
                   You mentioned in your book the idea of a Third Party
                    candidate. If I was going to pick a third party candidate,
                    or more ideal, such a candidate would emerge, I’d
                    want a “more technocratic person,” not for or against
                    things. . . I think the big thing that’s missing is a
                    technocratic understanding of the facts. . . not put
                    to acid test of party loyalty. . . .”
     Gates continues:
                    The debate would improve to have that numeric
                     person in the debate and then the newspapers
                     would be saying, “Yes, he’s mathematically correct”
                     and the public is going “WOW!” . . . Any place you
                     can get technocratic logic into reality–into the
                     discussion–how we do that, moving forward, for
                     health care, education. . . .
     Gates added that in education:
                    [O]ur Foundation is technocratically trying to help
                     experimentations with personnel systems. . . .I wake
                     up every day saying this technocratic element is
                     missing. . . I feel good about the work because of that. . . .
       Across America, hundreds of thousands of teachers wake up every day in terror because of Gates’ love of technocracy. Hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of children.
      Putting aside Gates’s disingenuous assertion that newspapers would record the words of a Third Party candidate with an affection for arithmetic and then the public would go “WOW!”,  consider that Al Smith, New York governor and Democratic U. S. presidential candidate in 1928 answered these claims about technocracy:
                       As for substituting engineers for political leaders in
                       running the country, I cannot refrain from mentioning
                       the fact that we have just finished an era of
                       government by engineers in Washington, and that the
                       people didn’t seem to like it. (Daily Mail, 6/6/1933)
      Smith was referring to former engineer and President Herbert Hoover, who flunked all the Stanford entrance exams except mathematics.
      In Doctor, Your Patient Will See You Now, Steven Z. Kussin, M. D. points out that “Different doctors use vastly different mutually incompatible data bases to guide their recommendations. . . Most physician databases. . . have been shown to contain biases, conflicts of interest, fraud, and outdated wisdom.”
      For ongoing examples of scientific fraud, subscribe to Retraction Watch. They are relentless as well as informative.
      Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy columnist at the Wall Street Journal, warns readers, Don’t Let Math Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes . Bialik laments that “many people, including holders of graduate degrees, professional researchers and even editors of scientific journals, can be too easily impressed by math.”
      Thomas Friedman, of course, is too easily impressed by math and too overwhelmed by money. Putty in Bill Gates’s hands. But the rest of us should be savvy enough to demand a Third Party candidate who shows a high degree of empathy for people in less fortunate circumstances, whose blood runs with the milk of human kindness and the passion for social justice, a candidate who would fight for a real Global Warming policy and who wouldn’t dream of establishing a Kill List.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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About the author

Susan Ohanian is a longtime teacher whose articles on education have appeared in publications ranging from Parents to The Nation. Her book One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards introduced the term "Standardisto." She has maintained a website of resistance since NCLB was signed into law in 2002: http://www.susanohanian.org

 
  • Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

    Gates comments are ironic, given all the innovations Microsoft pilfered from other technocrats under Gates leadership (e.g. the mouse, movable windows, drop down menus, which he stole from Apple, and the web browser, which he stole from Netscape). Gates junior owes his success, not to innovation, but to the clever lawyer Gates senior (whose law firm manages all the bond issues by the city of Seattle and the Seattle School District) hired to put together Microsoft’s initial offering and the financial clout which assured him a monopoly position. This is what monopolies do – they steal stuff because they have too much power for the real geniuses to say no to them. Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader played a major role in bring some of this to light, as well as pressuring the Justice Department (and eventually the EU) to file major antitrust actions around Microsoft’s predatory practices.

  • http://twitter.com/iamcompucomp iam

    Americans still equate wealth with virtue. Hence, they are willing to trust these people without question and the super rich feel they are entitled to act as gods. This god-like quality makes them view, political parties, electoral systems and other features of democracy, not as a threat but as merely “incorrect” and need of their own benign guidance.