09-26-2018, 10:58 PM
*** 27-Sep-18 World View -- Bill and Melinda Gates take Pollyannaish view of Rwanda and rest of world
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
****
**** Bill and Melinda Gates take Pollyannaish view of Rwanda and rest of world
****
![[Image: g180926b.jpg]](http://Media.GenerationalDynamics.com/ww2010/g180926b.jpg)
Bill and Melinda Gates
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, may be ideologically on the
left, but it's hard to criticize someone who is taking a global view
for the good of mankind, and is spending his own money to try to solve
world problems like poverty and HIV aids.
I met Bill Gates a few times during my past as a Senior Technology
Editor and technology journalist. I found him to be a brilliant man
at both marketing and technology. I recall digging into the code and
functionality of Windows 95 when it came out in 1995 and being
extremely impressed that so complex a product could work so well and
in so many diverse environments.
So when Melinda Gates was interviewed at length on CNBC on Tuesday, I
was curious to hear some specifics of her plans for how she and Bill
were going to save the world, and to analyze what she said from the
point of view of Generational Dynamics.
Like many people, she is completely oblivious to the growing
nationalism and xenophobia in the world, to the growing military
threats around the world, to the growing global financial crisis in
countries around the world, and how these things completely negate her
Pollyannaish view of the world, and how they make the investments
she's proposals either impossible or else completely worthless if they
occur, in this generational Crisis era.
I'll start with something she said near the end of the interview that
really caught my attention: (my transcription):
<QUOTE>As I traveled the world, I asked myself: is there
anywhere in the world where we have true equality for women, and
the answer is no, not even in the United States. ...
One of the places that have 40% women parliamentarians is Rwanda.
It's because President [Paul] Kagame said we will have 40% of
parliamentarians. They're way over that now."<END QUOTE>
In fact it is true that over 50% of the members of parliament in
Rwanda. Ms. Gates' point was that Paul Kagame is a great pro-woman
humanitarian who has bravely taken the political step to make sure
that there's gender equality in parliament.
But even someone without knowledge of generational theory can see
that's not what's going on here. Rwanda is in a region riven by
centuries of tribal war, particularly between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis.
In a three month period in 1994, Hutus massacred close to a million
Tutsis in the most brutal way.
I've described many times what happens in country after country in the
decades following a crisis ethnic civil war. Whoever comes to power
after the war uses brutal police power to suppress the opposition,
using the excuse that a new civil war must be prevented. This has
happened in DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Thailand, Cambodia,
Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and other places.
Paul Kagame was a Tutsi military leader who was killing Hutus in the
1980s, and continued doing so both before and after the 1994 genocide.
This is a person who has perpetrated some of the most horrific things
that one human being can do to another. Like many leaders in such
countries, he's refusing to give up power,
and he's using violence to suppress the opposition. Even
today, there are reports that he's using terror attacks to subvert the
Hutu government in Burundi. So he's no humanitarian, and if he
supposedly supported gender equality. There must be something else
going on.
An NPR article in 2016 described what happened:
<QUOTE>"Following 100 days of slaughter in 1994, Rwandan
society was left in chaos. The death toll was between 800,000 and
1 million. Many suspected perpetrators were arrested or fled the
country. Records show that immediately following the genocide,
Rwanda's population of 5.5 million to 6 million was 60 to 70
percent female. Most of these women had never been educated or
raised with the expectations of a career. In pre-genocide Rwanda,
it was almost unheard of for women to own land or take a job
outside the home.
The genocide changed all that. The war led to Rwanda's "Rosie the
Riveter" moment: It opened the workplace to Rwandan women just as
World War II had opened it to American women. ...
The call for equality was led not by thousands of women but by one
man — President Paul Kagame, who has led the country since his
army stopped the genocide. Kagame decided that Rwanda was so
demolished, so broken, it simply could not rebuild with men's
labor alone. So the country's new constitution, passed in 2003,
decreed that 30 percent of parliamentary seats be reserved for
women. The government also pledged that girls' education would be
encouraged. That women would be appointed to leadership roles,
like government ministers and police chiefs. Kagame vowed to not
merely play catch-up to the West but leapfrog ahead of
it."<END QUOTE>
So in a country whose population is 60-70% female, Paul Kagame sought
to appoint women to high positions. So when Ms. Gates uses Rwanda as
a model country to be emulated by other countries, you have to wonder
what she's thinking, or whether she knows anything about Rwanda before
the last six months.
I would assume the latter. I don't know anything personal about
Ms. Gates, but I would assume that she's like most Americans, and
thinks that "history always begins this morning."
The next question to ask is whether Rwanda is fundamentally different
from other countries, besides having a lot of women in parliament.
The same NPR article provides some answers:
<QUOTE>"But even though the change was dramatic and swift,
how deep was its impact? Can a country truly transform its core
culture from the outside in?
Justine Uvuza wondered that, and decided to find out. A Rwandan
herself who had grown up in a refugee camp in Uganda and then
moved back to Rwanda in 1994, after the genocide, she worked for a
while for the Kagame government promoting Rwanda's pro-women
policies. She was curious how much progress had been made. So when
she was getting her Ph.D. at Newcastle University, she returned to
Rwanda to interview female politicians about their lives — not
just their public positions but their private lives, with their
husbands and children. She found with rare exception that no
matter how powerful these women were in public, that power didn't
extend into their own homes.
"One told me how her husband expected her to make sure that his
shoes were polished, the water was put in the bathroom for him,
his clothes were ironed," Justine says. And this husband wanted
not only his shoes laid out in the morning, but his socks placed
on top of the shoes. And he wanted it done by his wife, the
parliamentarian."<END QUOTE>
So really, having women in parliament is great for show, but it makes
little difference in people's lives.
There are basic Generational Dynamics principles at work here. As
I've written many times, it's a core principle of Generational
Dynamics that, even in a dictatorship, major decisions are made by
masses of people, by generations of people. The attitudes of
politicians are irrelevant, except insofar as they represent the
attitudes of the people.
It's certainly commendable that Bill and Melinda Gates want to spend
their own money to promote gender equality. But I think that it's
unfortunate that they're wasting their money, time and effort on
programs that have a zero percent chance of succeeding.
Generational theory is not easy to understand, but Bill Gates is
capable of doing so. Gates and his wife should focus their attention
on programs that might actually work.
NPR (29-Jul-2016) and Newcastle University (PDF,2014)
****
**** Bill and Melinda Gates' programs for contraception availability
****
I'll give one more example from Ms. Gates' interview:
<QUOTE>"There's a youth boom in Africa - 60% of the
population is under the age of 25. If we invest in their health
and their education, they'll lift up their economies. They have
huge potential. They'll lift up the continent.
But the converse could also happen. If we don't make those
investments, you're going to see more HIV Aids, more deaths. So
we need to keep our eye on the ball and make these investments, as
a world. ...
I met women all over the world, and when I sit down and talk to
them, in their homes, in their villages, in a township, and really
listen to them ... they would say to me, "What about that tool,
what about that [contraceptive] shot. Why can't I get it?" They
would say, "I have five children, it's not fair to my youngest
child for me to have another women."
Somebody has to answer those cries, and somebody has to rise above
the politics, and say that this is important, has to be on the
global agenda.
I'm Catholic, I had many discussions with my family, my parents,
my siblings, with former priests and nums, and at the end of the
day I decided, I use these tools, I counsel all three of my
children, my sons, my daughter, to use these tools and know about
them, and I thought I have to follow my conscience. Women's
babies are dying because they're coming too quickly, and women's
bodies can't sustain what's going on. So at the end of the day, I
had to wrestle my conscience and my conscience says, this is the
right thing to do."<END QUOTE>
These are great objectives. And perhaps making contraceptive shots
available to women will will reduce population growth, especially if
the husband also thinks it's unfair to his five children to have a
sixth.
My personal opinion is that this kind of program will not work under
any circumstances, because the rate of population growth is deeply
embedded in the culture. Consider that in America there was a
reduction in fertility before WW II, and then a Baby Boom after WW II.
This had nothing to do with availability of contraceptives. There are
other examples of this type as well.
But even if the program worked, the effort would be totally wasted.
With nationalism and xenophobia increasing around the world in this
generational Crisis era, the world is headed for a world war, and
these contraceptive programs will simply fall off a cliff and be
totally irrelevant.
This should not be too difficult for Bill and Melinda Gates to
understand. Instead of wasting their effort on programs that a 100%
probability of failure, they should devote their efforts to preparing
for the world to come, after a world that has to be rebuilt by the 4-5
billion people who survive the world war, and then have to find their
way when the Singularity occurs. CNBC
Related Articles
****
**** Concerns grow about an approaching global financial crisis
****
In the last four or five years, I've noticed a major change in the
commentary of financial experts and analysts on television. It used
to be that the only view that was expressed was that the financial
system had recovered nicely from the financial crisis of ten years
ago, and that the worst that could happen is a mild recession, from
which the economy would recover quickly.
Ironically, even that hasn't happened. There has been a bull market
on Wall Street for years, much longer than history tells us is
possible.
So now what I'm hearing more and more is that analysts are strongly
hinting that a major financial crisis is coming.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday morning, JPMorgan's Mary
Erdoes was asked whether there are things in the global economy that
are too good to be true. She replied (my transcription):
<QUOTE>Oh lots of things. I mean everything from housing
prices in certain parts of the world, to currency prices in
certain parts of the world.
You can't possibly think we're in a normal world, when you have an
$11 dollars that was thrown at the market to buy whatever, to keep
things propped up.
Add to that a nice little tax reform in the United States of
America to help that, and you have negative yields in 40% of
europe. This is just not normal. You have not normal things, and
not normal things don't end well.
The problem is all of this stress testing in the world isn't
telling us what's going to manifest itself. next, because
everything - it seems too benign, everyone is so comfortable, and
that's exactly when you need to be the most
uncomfortable."<END QUOTE>
Other panelists concurred, mentioned other issues: inflexibility of
euro currency to meet crises, and closing of open borders.
I'm hearing this kind of thing a lot more these days. They clearly
are expecting a major global financial crash, triggered by something
completely unexpected - not a surprise to my readers. The S&P 500
Price/Earnings ratio is at 24.55, which is astronomical by historic
standards, where the historic average is 14, and it was around 5-6 as
recently as 1982, indicating that the stock market is in a huge
bubble.
Related Articles:
****
**** Today's major news from Europe: Meghan Markle closes a car door
****
![[Image: g180926c.jpg]](http://Media.GenerationalDynamics.com/ww2010/g180926c.jpg)
Meghan Markle closes a car door (BBC)
Former "Suits" star Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, the new wife of
Prince Harry, made big news on Wednesday when she closed a car door.
She was driven to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the opening of an
exhibition of works from the Oceania region.
She stepped out of the car, and closed the door. She's supposed to
wait for someone else to close the door for her.
This is now a major "moment" in the UK. The big question is: Will she
close her own car door again the next time she's driven to an event?
BBC
Related Articles:
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates,
Microsoft, Rwanda, Paul Kagame, Hutus, Tutsis, Burundi,
Justine Uvuza, Mary Erdoes,
Suits, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- Bill and Melinda Gates take Pollyannaish view of Rwanda and rest of world
- Bill and Melinda Gates' programs for contraception availability
- Concerns grow about an approaching global financial crisis
- Today's major news from Europe: Meghan Markle closes a car door
****
**** Bill and Melinda Gates take Pollyannaish view of Rwanda and rest of world
****
Bill and Melinda Gates
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, may be ideologically on the
left, but it's hard to criticize someone who is taking a global view
for the good of mankind, and is spending his own money to try to solve
world problems like poverty and HIV aids.
I met Bill Gates a few times during my past as a Senior Technology
Editor and technology journalist. I found him to be a brilliant man
at both marketing and technology. I recall digging into the code and
functionality of Windows 95 when it came out in 1995 and being
extremely impressed that so complex a product could work so well and
in so many diverse environments.
So when Melinda Gates was interviewed at length on CNBC on Tuesday, I
was curious to hear some specifics of her plans for how she and Bill
were going to save the world, and to analyze what she said from the
point of view of Generational Dynamics.
Like many people, she is completely oblivious to the growing
nationalism and xenophobia in the world, to the growing military
threats around the world, to the growing global financial crisis in
countries around the world, and how these things completely negate her
Pollyannaish view of the world, and how they make the investments
she's proposals either impossible or else completely worthless if they
occur, in this generational Crisis era.
I'll start with something she said near the end of the interview that
really caught my attention: (my transcription):
<QUOTE>As I traveled the world, I asked myself: is there
anywhere in the world where we have true equality for women, and
the answer is no, not even in the United States. ...
One of the places that have 40% women parliamentarians is Rwanda.
It's because President [Paul] Kagame said we will have 40% of
parliamentarians. They're way over that now."<END QUOTE>
In fact it is true that over 50% of the members of parliament in
Rwanda. Ms. Gates' point was that Paul Kagame is a great pro-woman
humanitarian who has bravely taken the political step to make sure
that there's gender equality in parliament.
But even someone without knowledge of generational theory can see
that's not what's going on here. Rwanda is in a region riven by
centuries of tribal war, particularly between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis.
In a three month period in 1994, Hutus massacred close to a million
Tutsis in the most brutal way.
I've described many times what happens in country after country in the
decades following a crisis ethnic civil war. Whoever comes to power
after the war uses brutal police power to suppress the opposition,
using the excuse that a new civil war must be prevented. This has
happened in DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Thailand, Cambodia,
Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and other places.
Paul Kagame was a Tutsi military leader who was killing Hutus in the
1980s, and continued doing so both before and after the 1994 genocide.
This is a person who has perpetrated some of the most horrific things
that one human being can do to another. Like many leaders in such
countries, he's refusing to give up power,
and he's using violence to suppress the opposition. Even
today, there are reports that he's using terror attacks to subvert the
Hutu government in Burundi. So he's no humanitarian, and if he
supposedly supported gender equality. There must be something else
going on.
An NPR article in 2016 described what happened:
<QUOTE>"Following 100 days of slaughter in 1994, Rwandan
society was left in chaos. The death toll was between 800,000 and
1 million. Many suspected perpetrators were arrested or fled the
country. Records show that immediately following the genocide,
Rwanda's population of 5.5 million to 6 million was 60 to 70
percent female. Most of these women had never been educated or
raised with the expectations of a career. In pre-genocide Rwanda,
it was almost unheard of for women to own land or take a job
outside the home.
The genocide changed all that. The war led to Rwanda's "Rosie the
Riveter" moment: It opened the workplace to Rwandan women just as
World War II had opened it to American women. ...
The call for equality was led not by thousands of women but by one
man — President Paul Kagame, who has led the country since his
army stopped the genocide. Kagame decided that Rwanda was so
demolished, so broken, it simply could not rebuild with men's
labor alone. So the country's new constitution, passed in 2003,
decreed that 30 percent of parliamentary seats be reserved for
women. The government also pledged that girls' education would be
encouraged. That women would be appointed to leadership roles,
like government ministers and police chiefs. Kagame vowed to not
merely play catch-up to the West but leapfrog ahead of
it."<END QUOTE>
So in a country whose population is 60-70% female, Paul Kagame sought
to appoint women to high positions. So when Ms. Gates uses Rwanda as
a model country to be emulated by other countries, you have to wonder
what she's thinking, or whether she knows anything about Rwanda before
the last six months.
I would assume the latter. I don't know anything personal about
Ms. Gates, but I would assume that she's like most Americans, and
thinks that "history always begins this morning."
The next question to ask is whether Rwanda is fundamentally different
from other countries, besides having a lot of women in parliament.
The same NPR article provides some answers:
<QUOTE>"But even though the change was dramatic and swift,
how deep was its impact? Can a country truly transform its core
culture from the outside in?
Justine Uvuza wondered that, and decided to find out. A Rwandan
herself who had grown up in a refugee camp in Uganda and then
moved back to Rwanda in 1994, after the genocide, she worked for a
while for the Kagame government promoting Rwanda's pro-women
policies. She was curious how much progress had been made. So when
she was getting her Ph.D. at Newcastle University, she returned to
Rwanda to interview female politicians about their lives — not
just their public positions but their private lives, with their
husbands and children. She found with rare exception that no
matter how powerful these women were in public, that power didn't
extend into their own homes.
"One told me how her husband expected her to make sure that his
shoes were polished, the water was put in the bathroom for him,
his clothes were ironed," Justine says. And this husband wanted
not only his shoes laid out in the morning, but his socks placed
on top of the shoes. And he wanted it done by his wife, the
parliamentarian."<END QUOTE>
So really, having women in parliament is great for show, but it makes
little difference in people's lives.
There are basic Generational Dynamics principles at work here. As
I've written many times, it's a core principle of Generational
Dynamics that, even in a dictatorship, major decisions are made by
masses of people, by generations of people. The attitudes of
politicians are irrelevant, except insofar as they represent the
attitudes of the people.
It's certainly commendable that Bill and Melinda Gates want to spend
their own money to promote gender equality. But I think that it's
unfortunate that they're wasting their money, time and effort on
programs that have a zero percent chance of succeeding.
Generational theory is not easy to understand, but Bill Gates is
capable of doing so. Gates and his wife should focus their attention
on programs that might actually work.
NPR (29-Jul-2016) and Newcastle University (PDF,2014)
****
**** Bill and Melinda Gates' programs for contraception availability
****
I'll give one more example from Ms. Gates' interview:
<QUOTE>"There's a youth boom in Africa - 60% of the
population is under the age of 25. If we invest in their health
and their education, they'll lift up their economies. They have
huge potential. They'll lift up the continent.
But the converse could also happen. If we don't make those
investments, you're going to see more HIV Aids, more deaths. So
we need to keep our eye on the ball and make these investments, as
a world. ...
I met women all over the world, and when I sit down and talk to
them, in their homes, in their villages, in a township, and really
listen to them ... they would say to me, "What about that tool,
what about that [contraceptive] shot. Why can't I get it?" They
would say, "I have five children, it's not fair to my youngest
child for me to have another women."
Somebody has to answer those cries, and somebody has to rise above
the politics, and say that this is important, has to be on the
global agenda.
I'm Catholic, I had many discussions with my family, my parents,
my siblings, with former priests and nums, and at the end of the
day I decided, I use these tools, I counsel all three of my
children, my sons, my daughter, to use these tools and know about
them, and I thought I have to follow my conscience. Women's
babies are dying because they're coming too quickly, and women's
bodies can't sustain what's going on. So at the end of the day, I
had to wrestle my conscience and my conscience says, this is the
right thing to do."<END QUOTE>
These are great objectives. And perhaps making contraceptive shots
available to women will will reduce population growth, especially if
the husband also thinks it's unfair to his five children to have a
sixth.
My personal opinion is that this kind of program will not work under
any circumstances, because the rate of population growth is deeply
embedded in the culture. Consider that in America there was a
reduction in fertility before WW II, and then a Baby Boom after WW II.
This had nothing to do with availability of contraceptives. There are
other examples of this type as well.
But even if the program worked, the effort would be totally wasted.
With nationalism and xenophobia increasing around the world in this
generational Crisis era, the world is headed for a world war, and
these contraceptive programs will simply fall off a cliff and be
totally irrelevant.
This should not be too difficult for Bill and Melinda Gates to
understand. Instead of wasting their effort on programs that a 100%
probability of failure, they should devote their efforts to preparing
for the world to come, after a world that has to be rebuilt by the 4-5
billion people who survive the world war, and then have to find their
way when the Singularity occurs. CNBC
Related Articles
- Rwanda's president Kagame becomes another leader refusing to leave office (19-Nov-2015)
- Generational history of Hutu and Tutsi tribes (30-Apr-2015)
****
**** Concerns grow about an approaching global financial crisis
****
In the last four or five years, I've noticed a major change in the
commentary of financial experts and analysts on television. It used
to be that the only view that was expressed was that the financial
system had recovered nicely from the financial crisis of ten years
ago, and that the worst that could happen is a mild recession, from
which the economy would recover quickly.
Ironically, even that hasn't happened. There has been a bull market
on Wall Street for years, much longer than history tells us is
possible.
So now what I'm hearing more and more is that analysts are strongly
hinting that a major financial crisis is coming.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday morning, JPMorgan's Mary
Erdoes was asked whether there are things in the global economy that
are too good to be true. She replied (my transcription):
<QUOTE>Oh lots of things. I mean everything from housing
prices in certain parts of the world, to currency prices in
certain parts of the world.
You can't possibly think we're in a normal world, when you have an
$11 dollars that was thrown at the market to buy whatever, to keep
things propped up.
Add to that a nice little tax reform in the United States of
America to help that, and you have negative yields in 40% of
europe. This is just not normal. You have not normal things, and
not normal things don't end well.
The problem is all of this stress testing in the world isn't
telling us what's going to manifest itself. next, because
everything - it seems too benign, everyone is so comfortable, and
that's exactly when you need to be the most
uncomfortable."<END QUOTE>
Other panelists concurred, mentioned other issues: inflexibility of
euro currency to meet crises, and closing of open borders.
I'm hearing this kind of thing a lot more these days. They clearly
are expecting a major global financial crash, triggered by something
completely unexpected - not a surprise to my readers. The S&P 500
Price/Earnings ratio is at 24.55, which is astronomical by historic
standards, where the historic average is 14, and it was around 5-6 as
recently as 1982, indicating that the stock market is in a huge
bubble.
Related Articles:
- Explanation of Price/Earnings ratio and Stock Valuations (28-Aug-2015)
- S&P 500 Price/Earnings ratio rockets to highest value in years (23-Apr-2016)
- Wharton School's Jeremy Siegel is lying about stock valuations (14-Apr-2012)
****
**** Today's major news from Europe: Meghan Markle closes a car door
****
Meghan Markle closes a car door (BBC)
Former "Suits" star Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, the new wife of
Prince Harry, made big news on Wednesday when she closed a car door.
She was driven to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the opening of an
exhibition of works from the Oceania region.
She stepped out of the car, and closed the door. She's supposed to
wait for someone else to close the door for her.
This is now a major "moment" in the UK. The big question is: Will she
close her own car door again the next time she's driven to an event?
BBC
Related Articles:
- Britain's Prince Harry acknowledges that he killed Taliban insurgents (22-Jan-2013)
- Prince Harry will return to Afghanistan (17-Jun-2011)
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates,
Microsoft, Rwanda, Paul Kagame, Hutus, Tutsis, Burundi,
Justine Uvuza, Mary Erdoes,
Suits, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
