Thousands of news stories have profiled Bill Gates’s generosity over the last two decades. Essentially every day, headlines remind us of his private foundation’s largesse: a million dollars here, a billion dollars there. These are mind-bending sums for most of us—but they have also effectively short-circuited our brains. The one-sided storytelling about Gates’s selfless philanthropy has created a dangerous mythology that misunderstands who Bill Gates really is and what he is actually doing.
在过去的二十年里，数以千计的新闻报道介绍了比尔·盖茨的慷慨。基本上每天的头条新闻都在提醒我们他的私人基金会的慷慨：这里一百万美元，那里十亿美元。这对大多数人来说是令人难以置信的巨额金额，但这些数字也有效地使我们的大脑短路。关于盖茨无私慈善事业的片面叙述，已经创造了一个危险的神话，让人们误解了比尔·盖茨真正的身份和他实际在做什么。
After two decades of philanthropic giving, Bill Gates continues to be one of richest people on the planet. He boasts a private fortune of $117 billion (and that’s after his costly divorce from Melinda, whose bank account today exceeds $10 billion). He also oversees the Gates Foundation’s $67 billion endowment. The combined $184 billion he controls surpasses the gross domestic product of virtually every poor nation in which the Gates Foundation works today.
经过二十年的慈善捐赠，比尔·盖茨仍然是全球最富有的人之一。他拥有1170亿美元的私人财富（这是在他与梅琳达离婚后的财富，梅琳达目前的银行账户已超过100亿美元）。他还掌管着盖茨基金会670亿美元的捐赠基金。他合计控制了1840亿美元。这几乎超过了盖茨基金会目前正在开展工作的每一个贫困国家的GDP。
A sober analysis of Gates shows he is just as worthy of the titles of hoarder and miser as he is philanthropist and mensch. Relative to his vast wealth, Gates is giving away a tiny amount of money—that he doesn’t need and that he could never possibly spend on himself. So the question is: Instead of celebrating the million-dollar gifts his foundation donates, why aren’t we interrogating the $184 billion that Gates isn’t giving away? Why aren’t we asking: How is it that the world’s most generous philanthropist is becoming richer and richer, year over year?
对盖茨的冷静分析表明，他既不愧为慈善家和好人，也不愧为囤积者和守财奴。相对于他的巨额财富而言，盖茨捐出的钱微不足道。而捐出的这些钱他根本不需要，也不可能花在自己身上。因此，问题在于：与其庆祝他的基金会捐出了百万美元的捐赠，为什么我们不对盖茨没有捐出的1840亿美元进行质询呢？我们为什么不问：世界上最慷慨的慈善家为什么会一年比一年富有？
比尔·盖茨在一场新闻发布会上发言，宣布一项增加对联合国可持续发展目标认知的计划。
图片来源：Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP / Getty
It’s the kind of contradiction that defines Gates, one of the most misunderstood people in the world. Much of what we know about Gates, or think we know, comes from Gates himself—from the research his foundation funds, the think tanks it sponsors, the journalism it underwrites, and the megaphone Gates has cranked up to 11. Arguably the most effective aspect of Gates’s philanthropic career has been its PR. And, arguably, the single biggest beneficiary of the Gates Foundation has been Bill Gates, himself.
盖茨是世界上最容易被误解的人之一，这种矛盾定义了盖茨。我们对盖茨的了解，或者说我们自认为对盖茨的了解，大多来自盖茨本人，来自他的基金会资助的研究、赞助的智囊团、支持的新闻报道，以及盖茨的传声筒。可以说，盖茨的慈善事业最有效的一方面是其公关工作。也可以说，盖茨基金会最大的受益者是比尔·盖茨本人。
The Gates Foundation ferociously claims that its “bottom line is the lives saved,” which Bill Gates also describes as his North Star. Asked by CNN in 2021 whether he would be joining fellow billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk—in their missile-measuring race into outer space, Gates made a big show of staying above the fray: “Until we can get rid of malaria and tuberculosis, and all these diseases that are so terrible in poor countries, that’s going to be my total focus.… I do hope that people who are rich will find ways to give their wealth back to society with high impact. Clearly, they’ve got skills. They can’t, or shouldn’t, want to consume it all themselves.”CNN, which receives millions of dollars in charitable donations from the Gates Foundation, did not challenge Gates’s claimed moral authority or good-billionaire routine. If it were engaged in real journalism, it would, at the very least, have offered context.
盖茨基金会极力宣称其“底线是拯救生命”，比尔·盖茨也将之描述为他的北极星。2021年，CNN问盖茨是否会加入其他亿万富翁（杰夫·贝索斯、理查德·布兰森和埃隆·马斯克）的太空探索竞赛，盖茨高调地表示自己将置身于争斗之外：“除非我们能消除疟疾和肺结核，以及所有这些在贫穷国家非常可怕的疾病，否则这将是我的全部关注点……我确实希望那些富人能够找到高效的方式将他们的财富返还给社会。显然，他们有这个才能。他们不能，也不应该，想要把所有钱都花在自己身上。”CNN，这家从盖茨基金会获得数百万美元慈善捐款的机构，并未质疑盖茨所声称的道德权威或好亿万富翁的行为规范。如果这是真正的新闻报道，CNN至少应该提供一些背景信息。
It seems important to inform audiences, for example, about the very significant time and energy that Gates spends on self-enrichment and wealth accumulation. Through his climate-focused investment fund, Breakthrough Energy, Gates has invested money in a rocket company named Stoke. Elsewhere, he has a majority stake in the luxury hotel Four Seasons, and is reportedly the largest private owner of farmland in the United States. And, recently, Gates made a casual $500 million bet against Tesla, publicly acknowledging that it had only one purpose: to make money.
似乎有必要让观众们了解，例如盖茨在自我致富和财富积累方面花费的大量时间和精力。通过他的气候投资基金Breakthrough Energy，盖茨向一家名为Stoke的火箭公司投入了资金。在其他方面，他拥有豪华酒店四季酒店的多数股份。据说盖茨还是美国最大的私人农田所有者。最近，盖茨还随意地用5亿美元做空特斯拉公司，并公开承认其目的只有一个：赚钱。
For a guy who publicly claims that his “total focus” is helping the global poor, Gates also appears to devote considerable time to sitting for self-aggrandizing interviews—often with news outlets that his private foundation funds. Talking to BBC, the recipient of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, he once again took softball questions about whether he had ambitions to go into space, using the opportunity to trumpet his philanthropic work on Earth. A child’s life can be saved for only $1,000, Gates noted, echoing similar claims he has made for years. It seems more than fair, at a point, to aim Gates’s data analysis at his own wealth. By Gates’s own figures, his $184 billion wealth could save 184 million lives—if he gave that money away.
对于一个公开宣称他的“全部关注”是帮助全球贫困人口的人来说，盖茨似乎也花了相当多的时间接受自我吹嘘的采访，往往是由他的私人基金会资助的新闻机构进行的。在接受BBC（盖茨基金会数百万美金的接收者）的采访中，盖茨再次回答了关于是否有进入太空的野心的简单问题，并借此机会宣传了他在地球上的慈善工作。盖茨指出，只需1000美元就能挽救一个孩子的生命，这是他多年来一直提出的类似主张。在某种程度上，把盖茨的数据分析方法用于他自己的财富，似乎是相当合理的。根据盖茨自己的数据，他1840亿美元的财富可以拯救1.84亿人的生命，如果他把这些钱捐出去的话。
This calculation, like much of Gates’s “numbers guy” routine, is pure pablum. But however you cut the numbers, Gates’s vast wealth could help the world in far-reaching ways, for example if it were redistributed as cash gifts to the poor. That can’t happen through the Gates Foundation’s father-knows-best, look-at-me brand of bureaucratic philanthropy. Gates isn’t interested in empowering the poor; he’s interested in imposing his solutions. Following the money from the Gates Foundation confirms this. Nearly 90 percent of the foundation’s charitable dollars go to organizations located in wealthy nations, not the poor countries he claims to serve. Never mind that the Gates Foundation’s website is inundated with the images of smiling poor people of color; in practice, the Gates model is funding white-collared bodies in the Global North to fix those wearing dashikis, burqas, saris, and kangas in the Global South.
这种计算方法，就像盖茨的许多“数字专家”套路一样，纯粹是空洞的话。但无论如何计算，盖茨的巨额财富都能以深远的方式帮助世界。例如，如果把这些财富以现金的形式重新分配给穷人。但盖茨基金会那种“老子最清楚”、“看着我”的官僚慈善方式，无法实现这一点。盖茨并不想赋权贫困人群；他更感兴趣的是把自己的解决方案强加于他人。对盖茨基金会资金的跟踪证实了这一点。该基金会近90%的慈善资金都流向了富裕国家的组织，而不是他声称要服务的贫穷国家。别忘了，盖茨基金会的网站上充斥着有色人种穷人微笑的图片；实际上，盖茨模式是在资助全球北方的白领机构，以解决全球南方那些穿着达西基（西非男子服饰）、罩袍、纱丽和肯加女服(非洲女子裹身布)的人的问题。
A growing group of Gates’s intended beneficiaries today criticize him as doing more harm than good, and some have explicitly asked him to stop helping. “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need,” noted the headline of an op-ed in Scientific American, authored by Million Belay and Bridget Mugambe from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. From farmer organizations in sub-Saharan Africa to public health experts around the globe to public school teachers in the United States, critics cite the high opportunity costs of Gates’s charitable crusades and the vast collateral damage they leave behind.
如今，越来越多盖茨的目标受益人，批评盖茨所做的事情弊大于利，一些人明确要求他停止援助。《科学美国人/Scientific American》杂志的一篇专栏文章的标题是“比尔·盖茨应该停止告诉非洲人，非洲人需要什么样的农业”。文章作者是非洲粮食主权联盟（Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa）的百万·贝莱和布里奇特·穆甘贝。从撒哈拉以南的非洲农民组织到全球各地的公共卫生专家，再到美国的公立学校教师，批评者们都提到盖茨慈善活动的高机会成本，以及它们所留下的巨大的附带损害。
No one elected or appointed Gates to lead the world—on any topic. Gates simply asserted his vast wealth to take power. He has put his hands on the levers of the world, trying to remake how we feed, medicate, and educate poor people according to his own narrow neoliberal ideology. The Microsoft founder even faces long-standing allegations of destructive monopoly power in his philanthropic ventures, as he has planted his flag and sought to take over fields like malaria research and health metrics.
没有人选举或任命盖茨来领导世界——在任何议题上。盖茨只是凭借自己的巨额财富取得了权力。他将手伸向了世界的控制杆，试图按照自己狭隘的新自由主义意识形态，来改造我们如何为穷人提供食物、药品和教育。这位微软创始人甚至长期被指控在其慈善事业中拥有破坏性的垄断权力。因为他竖立了自己的旗帜，试图接管诸如疟疾研究和健康评估之类的领域。
There are few words that better describe this model of power—where the richest guy gets the loudest voice—than “oligarchy.” And no one has done more to normalize and institutionalize oligarchy than Gates. By masking his money-in-politics efforts under the banner of charity—instead of, say, lobbying or campaign contributions—Gates commands tax benefits, endless accolades, and public applause. Philanthropy has been very, very good to our “good billionaire.”
没有比“寡头政治”更恰当的词汇来描述这种权力模式了。在这种权力模式下，最富有的人拥有最响亮的声音。而在规范化和制度化寡头政治方面，没有人比盖茨做得更多。通过将他在政治方面的金钱工作伪装成慈善事业，而不是进行游说或竞选捐款。盖茨获得了税收优惠、无尽的赞誉和公众掌声。慈善事业对我们的“好亿万富翁”确实非常有利。
This lesson has not been lost on Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of other billionaires who have pledged to follow in Gates’s footsteps, turning their vast private wealth into expansive political power through philanthropy, whether it is remaking climate policy, reshaping American public schools, or influencing the debate over how we regulate AI. That makes it all the more important that the rest of us also master this lesson. We have allowed Gates, Bezos, and Zuckerberg to become obscenely wealthy and now we are allowing these men to turn their wealth into tax-privileged political power through philanthropy. These are choices we can also un-make. But to do so, we must learn to see past the PR halo.
这个经验教训并没有被杰夫·贝索斯、马克·扎克伯格和数百名其他亿万富翁所忽视，他们承诺效仿盖茨的脚步，通过慈善事业将他们庞大的私人财富转化为广泛的政治权力，无论是重塑气候政策、改造美国公立学校，还是影响我们如何监管人工智能的辩论。因此，我们其他人也必须掌握这一课。我们已经允许盖茨、贝索斯和扎克伯格变得过分富有，现在我们正在允许这些人通过慈善事业将他们的财富变成有税收优惠的政治权力。这是我们也可以改变的选择。但要做到这一点，我们必须学会看穿公关光环。
When the super-rich engage in charity, it has a way of not just scrambling our cognition, but also our humanity. The dollars on the table tempt us into a dangerous ends-justifies-the-means logic in which we focus on the enormous public goods that can be created through private wealth and ignore the known harms caused in its creation, or the antidemocratic power it engenders, or the alternatives at hand—most simply, redistributing billionaire wealth through taxation instead of philanthropy.
当超级富豪参与慈善事业时，它不仅会扰乱我们的认知，还会扰乱我们的人性。在这种逻辑中，我们只关注私人财富所能创造的巨大公共利益，却忽视了在创造财富的过程中所造成的已知危害，或由此产生的反民主权力，或者手头的替代方案。最简单的，就是通过税收而不是慈善事业，来重新分配亿万富翁的财富。
The word “philanthropy,” from the Greek, means lover of humanity. A charitable gift is meant to be an act of love, not an exercise of power. Giving away money is not supposed to magnify the asymmetries in power that govern society but to collapse them. And this is why, in many respects, Gates might be better described as a misanthrope—if he does not hate his fellow human, then he certainly views himself as superior. Gates’s disregard for the wishes, needs, rights, dignity, intelligence, and talent of the poor people that he claims to be serving speaks to the fundamentally colonial lens through which he executes his charitable empire. It highlights the existential limits of what he can accomplish, and it explains why the Gates Foundation has achieved so little.
“慈善”一词来自希腊语，意思是“对人类的爱”。一份慈善捐赠应该是一种爱的行为，而不是权力的行使。捐赠钱财的目的不应该是放大统治社会的不对称力量，而是为了瓦解这种不对称。这也是为什么在许多方面，盖茨可能更适合被描述为一个厌世者。如果他并非憎恨自己的同类，那么他肯定认为自己高人一等。盖茨无视贫困人群的愿望、需求、权利、尊严、智慧和才能，而他却声称要为穷人服务。这从根本上说明，他是通过殖民主义的视角来实施他的慈善帝国。这凸显了他所能取得的成就存在局限性，也解释了为什么盖茨基金会取得的成就如此有限。
It’s not that Gates isn’t well intentioned, or that his charitable interventions have never helped anyone. Clearly, the tens of billions of dollars the Gates Foundation has given away have helped people at times and, yes, saved lives. But these wins should be viewed, at best, as a thin silver lining in a very dark cloud. At some point, we should understand that humanitarianism aimed at real human progress—equality, justice, freedom—requires us to challenge unaccountable power and illegitimate leaders, not worship them. And that means Bill Gates is a problem, not a solution.
这并不是说盖茨没有善意，也不是说他的慈善干预从未帮助过任何人。显然，盖茨基金会捐出的数百亿美元有时帮助了一些人。是的，还拯救了一些人的生命。但是，我们充其量只能把这些善举看作是乌云密布中的一线曙光。在某个时候，我们应该认识到，致力于真正的人类进步，即平等、正义、自由的人道主义，需要我们挑战不负责任的权力和不合法的领导人，而不是崇拜他们。这意味着比尔·盖茨是一个问题，而不是一个解决方案。
关键句翻译
官僚慈善指的是通过大型基金会或慈善机构进行的慈善活动，其执行方式类似于官僚体系。批评者认为，这种形式的慈善往往过于集中权力，可能会导致捐赠人通过操纵慈善机构来推动其个人或特定议程，而不是真正服务于公众利益。那么官僚慈善的英文是什么？
Bureaucratic philanthropy
bureaucratic adj. 官僚的；官僚主义的
翻译、撰稿：丁适于（杭州市基金会发展促进会）
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