After eightthirty three year leave of absence from his alma mater. I am pleased to presentto you Doctor William Gates. President Bok. Former President Rubinstein,incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board ofOverseers, members of the faculty parents, and especially the graduates. I'vebeen waiting more than thirty years to say this. Dad, I always told you I'dcome back and get my degree.
I want to thankHarvard..I'd be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have acollege degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates for taking a much moredirect route to your degrees. Come on my part, I'm just happy that the Crimsonhas called me Harvard's most successful dropout. I guess that makes mevaledictorian of my own special class. I did the best of everyone who failed. Ialso want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out ofbusiness school.
I'm a badinfluence..That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I hadspoken at your orientation. might be here today. Hubbard was a phenomenalexperience for me. The academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lotsof classes I hadn't even signed up for, and dorm life was terrific. I lived upat Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dormroom late at night, discussing things because everyone knew I didn't worryabout getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be the leader of theantisocial group we clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection.Of all those social people. Radcliffe was a great place to live, There weremore women up there, and most of the guys were math science types. Thecombination offered me the best odds. If you know what I mean. That's where Ilearned the sad lesson. Improving your odds doesn't guarantee success. One ofmy biggest memories of Harvard came in January, one thousand nine hundred,seventy five when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque,New Mexico, that had begun making the world's first personal computer, Ioffered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just astudent in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead, they said, we're not quite ready.Come see us in a month, which was a good thing because we hadn't written thesoftware yet. From that moment I worked day and night on that extra creditproject that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of aremarkable journey with Microsoft. What I remember above all about Harvard wasbeing in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could beexhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but alwayschallenging. It was an amazing privilege, and though I left early, I wastransformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made and the ideas Iworked on. Taking a serious look back. I do have one big regret. I left Harvardwith no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world the appallingdisparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemn millions ofpeople to lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas ineconomics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in thesciences. But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but inhow those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.
Whether throughdemocracy,.strong public education, quality health care or broad economicopportunity, reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. I left campusknowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educationalopportunities here in this country, and I knew nothing about the millions ofpeople living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. Ittook me decades to find out. You graduates came to Harvard at a different time.You know more about the world's inequities than the classes that came before.In your years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how, in this ageof accelerating technology, we can finally take on these inequities, and we cansolve them. Imagine just for the sake of discussion that you had a few hours aweek and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause. And you wanted to spendthat time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving andimproving lives. How would you spend it? From an end and I, the challenge isthe same how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resourceswe have? In our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an articleabout the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries,from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles,malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever one disease that I had neverheard of, rotavirus was killing half a million children each year. None of themin the United States. We were shocked. We'd assume that if millions of childrenwere dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority todiscover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under adollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren't beingdelivered. If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting tolearn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said toourselves, this can't be true, but if it is true, it deserves to be thepriority of our giving. So we began to begin our work in the same way. Anyonehere would begin. It. We asked. How could the world let these children die?Answer is simple and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of thesechildren, and governments did not subsidize it. so the children died becausetheir mothers and fathers had no power in the market and no voice in thesystem. But you and I have both. We can make market forces work better for thepoor if we can develop a more creative capitalism. If we can stretch the reachof market forces so that more people can make a profit or at least earn aliving serving people who are suffering from the great inequities. We can alsopress governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that betterreflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. We can find approaches thatmeet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votesfor politicians. We will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in theworld. Now this task is open ended. It can never be finished. But a consciouseffort to answer this challenge can change the world. I am optimistic that wecan do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope they sayinequity has been with us since the beginning and will be with us until theend, because people just don't care. I completely disagree. I believe we havemore caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this yard at onetime or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we didnothing, not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. Ifwe had known how to help, we would have acted. The barrier to change is not toolittle caring. it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we needto see a problem, see a solution and see the impact. But complexity blocks allthree steps. Eat up with the advent of the Internet and twenty power news. Itis still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When anairplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promiseto investigate, determine the cause and prevent similar patches in the futures.But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say. Of all the people inthe world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent wereon this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problemthat took the lives of the one half of one percent. The problem is not just theplane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths. We don't read much aboutthese deaths. The media covers what's new and millions of people dying isnothing new, so it stays in the background, where it's easy to ignore. But evenwhen we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eye eyes on theproblem. It's difficult to look at suffering if the situation is so complexthat we don't know how to help. and so we look away. If we can really see aproblem, which is the first step, we come to the second step. Cutting throughthe complexity to find a solution. Finding solutions is essential if we want tomake the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime, anorganization or individual asks, how can I help, then we can get action and wecan make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. The complexitymakes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares and makes it hardfor their caring to matter. Cutting through complexity to find solutions, onethrough four predictable stages determine a goal find the highest impactapproach, deliver the technology ideal for that approach and in the meantime,use the best application of technology you already have, whether it's somethingsophisticated, like a new drug or something simple, like a bed net. AIDSepidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease.The highest leverage of Cokes, his convention. The ideal technology would be avaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drugcompanies and foundations, fund vaccine research. But their work is likely totake more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we havein hand and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoidrisky behavior. Pursuing that goal starts the poor step cycle again. This isthe pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working and neverdo what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the twentieth century, which isto surrender to complexity and quit. The final step, after seeing the problemand finding an approach is to measure the impact of the work and to share thatsuccess or failure so that others can learn from the upwards. You have to havethe statistics. Of course you have to be able to show, for example, that aprogram is vaccinating millions more millions more children. You have to beable to show, for example, a decline in the number of children dying from thediseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to helpdraw more investment from business and government. If you want to inspirepeople to participate, you have to show more than numbers. you have to conveythe human impact of the work so people can feel what saving a life means to thefamilies affected. I remember going to the World Economic Forum some years backand sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millionsof lives. Millions. Of the thrill if you could save just one person's life,then multiply that by millions. Yet this was the most boring panel I've everbeen on. So boring, even I couldn't stand it. What made that experienceespecially striking, was that I had just come from an event where we wereintroducing version thirteen of some piece of software, and we had peoplejumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited aboutsoftware, but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives? Youcan't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact.
The way to dothat is another complex question..Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has beenwith us forever. but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have notbeen with us forever. They are new, they can help us make the most of ourcaring. And that's why the future can be different from the past. The definingand ongoing innovations of this age, biotechnology, the personal computer andthe Internet give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty andend death from preventable disease. Sixty years ago, George Marshall came tothis commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of postwar Europe.He said, I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormouscomplexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press andradio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street. To reach a clearappraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance tograsp at all the real significance of the situation. Thirty years afterMarshall made his address. But it was thirty years ago, as my class graduatedwithout me. Technology was emerging. that would make the world smaller, moreopen, more visible, less distant. The emergence of lowcost personal computersgave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learningand communicating. A magical thing about this network is not just that itcollapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramaticallyincreases the number of brilliant minds we can bring in to work together on thesame problem, and it scales up the rate of potential innovation to a staggeringdegree. At the same time, for every person who has access to this technology,five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of thisdiscussion smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience whodon't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas tothe world. We need as many people as possible, to gain access to thistechnology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in human, inwhat human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not justfor national governments but for universities, corporations, smallerorganizations and even individuals to see problems, see approaches and measurethe impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty and desperation. GeorgeMarshall spoke up sixty years ago. Members of the Harvard family. Here in theyard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. Forwhat purpose? There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the studentsand the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives ofpeople here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate itsintellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?Let me make a request of the deans and the professors. The intellectual leadershere at Harvard. As you hire new faculty award tenure, review curriculum anddetermine degree requirements, please ask yourselves Should our best minds bemore dedicated to solving our biggest problems? Should Harvard encourage itsfaculty to take on the world's worst inequities?
Should Harvardstudents know about the depth of global poverty,.the prevalence of worldhunger, the scarcity of clean water, the girls kept out of school, the childrenwho die from diseases we can cure. Should the world's most privileged learnabout the lives of the world's least privileged? These are not rhetoricalquestions.
You will answerwith your policies..My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admittedhere, never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before I wasmarried, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter aboutmarriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer atthe time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at theclose of the letter, she said. From those to whom much is given much isexpected.
When youconsider what those of us here in this yard have been given intalent,.privilege and opportunity, there is almost no limit to what the worldhas a right to expect from us. In line with the promise of this age, I want toexhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue a complex problem, a deepinequity and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of yourcareer. That would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that. to make animpact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of theInternet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriersand find ways to cut through them. Don't let complexity stop you, he arguedactivists take on big inequities. I feel sure it will be one of the greatexperiences of your lives. You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time.As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had.You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have, and with thatawareness you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you ifyou abandon these people whose lives you could change with modest effort. Youhave more than we had. You must start sooner and carry on longer. And I hopeyou will come back here to Harvard thirty years from now, and reflect on whatyou have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judgeyourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how wellyou have addressed the world's deepest inequities. And how well you treatedpeople a world away who have nothing in common with you. But their humanity.Good luck.
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