Evidence for our faith

Bill Gates discusses the markets and his efforts to address critical public issues through his foundation.



If we need evidence for faith in people and markets to address our needs effectively, this is a good discussion. We are more capable than we give ourselves credit. We should have confidence in that fact.

"After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted"

David Grossman has a beautiful and poignant reflection, in the Washington Post, today, on the Gaza war and the need for peace and talk "to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted."

Israel must stop fanning the flames that will consume us

That very moving and honest piece in toto:

"Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster -- despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the one who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.

So, a month after the war began, in the midst of the wave of nationalist invective now sweeping Israel, it would not hurt to keep in mind that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin.

As both Israel and Hamas declared their own cease-fires, we Israelis rejoiced at how this campaign has rectified Israel's military failures in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. But we should listen to the voice that says that the Israel Defense Forces' achievements are not indubitable proof that Israel was right to set out on an operation of such huge proportions; they certainly do not justify the way our army pursued its mission. The IDF's success confirms only that Israel is much stronger than Hamas, and that under certain circumstances it can be very tough and cruel.

But as the magnitude of the killing and the devastation has become apparent to all, perhaps Israeli society will, for a brief moment, put its sophisticated mechanisms of repression and self-righteousness on hold. And then perhaps a lesson of some sort will be etched into the Israeli consciousness. Maybe then we will finally understand something deep and fundamental -- that our conduct here in this region has, for a long time, been flawed, immoral and unwise. Time and again, it fans the flames that are consuming us.

Of course, the Palestinians cannot be absolved of culpability for their errors and crimes. To do so would show contempt and condescension toward them, as if they were not rational adults responsible for their mistakes and oversights. True, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were in large measure "strangled" by Israel, but they, too, had other options, other ways of protesting, voicing and displaying their difficult plight. Firing thousands of rockets at innocent civilians in Israel was not their only choice. We must not forget that. We must not be forgiving of the Palestinians, as if it goes without saying that when they are in distress, their almost automatic response must be violence.

But even when the Palestinians act with reckless belligerence -- with suicide bombings and Qassam missiles -- Israel, which is many times stronger than they are, has tremendous power to control the level of violence in the conflict as a whole. As such, it can also have a profound influence on calming the conflict and extricating both sides from its cycle of destruction. This most recent military action indicates that there does not seem to be anyone in the Israeli leadership who grasps that, who fully appreciates this critical aspect of the dispute.

After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted. How can that day come if we do not understand that our military might cannot be our principal tool for establishing our presence here, across from and among the Arab nations? How can those days come if we do not grasp the gravity of the responsibility imposed on us by our multifarious, fateful ties and connections, past and future, with the Palestinian nation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and inside Israel itself?

When the clouds of smoke clear, when the politicians' declarations of comprehensive, decisive victory fade, when we realize what this operation has really achieved, when we see how large the gap is between those declarations and what we really need to know in order to live a normal life in this region, when we acknowledge that an entire nation eagerly hypnotized itself because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure its Lebanon malady -- then we can turn our attention to those who time and again have incited Israeli society's hubris and its exaltation of power. To those who have, for so many years, taught us to scorn belief in peace and hope for any change at all in our relations with the Arabs. To those who have persuaded us that the Arabs understand only force, and that we can speak to them only in that language.

Since we have spoken that way to them so often, and only that way, we have forgotten that there are other languages that can be used to communicate with other human beings, even enemies, even enemies as bitter as Hamas -- languages that are mother tongues to us, the Israelis, no less so than the language of the jet and the tank.

To talk to the Palestinians. That must be the central conclusion we reach from this last, bloody round of war. To talk even with those who do not recognize our right to exist here. Instead of ignoring Hamas now, we must take advantage of the new situation and enter into a dialogue to enable an accommodation with the Palestinian people as a whole. To talk, in order to understand that reality is not just the hermetically sealed story that we and the Palestinians have been telling ourselves for generations, the story that we are imprisoned within, no small part of which consists of fantasies, wishes and nightmares. To talk in order to devise, within this opaque, unhearing reality, an opportunity for speech, for that alternative -- so scorned and forlorn today -- for which, in the tempest of war, there is almost no place, no hope, no believers.

To talk as a well-considered strategy, to initiate dialogue, to insist on speech, to talk to the wall, to talk even if it seems fruitless. In the long term, this stubbornness may do far more for our future than hundreds of airplanes dropping bombs on a city and its people. To talk out of the understanding, born of the recent horrors we have seen, that the destruction we, each people in its own way, are able to cause one another is a huge and corrupting force. If we surrender to it and its logic, it will, in the end, destroy us all.

To talk, because what has taken place in Gaza over the past three weeks places before us in Israel a mirror that reflects a face that would horrify us were we to gaze on it for one moment from the outside, or if we were to see it on another nation. We would understand then that our victory is no real victory, and that the war in Gaza has not brought us any healing in that place where we desperately need a cure.

David Grossman is a leading Israeli novelist and peace activist. A version of this article first appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It was translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman."

This is a final word on this conflict, as far as I am concerned, save for the words that finally end the bloodshed. There is much practical security work that must be done to finally bring a peace. But words must come first.

Let us pray that pointless tragedy and the bonfire of their vanities will not continue to consume these foolish, foolish neighbors.

Warren Buffett on the economy

This is why I love this guy.

"SG: But there is debate about whether there should be fiscal stimulus, whether tax cuts work or not. There is all of this academic debate among economists. What do you think? Is that the right way to go with stimulus and tax cuts?

WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it and whether it’s more effective if you’re fighting a fire to be concentrating the water flow on this part or that part. You’re going to use every weapon you have in fighting it. And people, they do not know exactly what the effects are. Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it. What we do know is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hoover-like policies would be a mistake and we don’t know how effective in the short run we don’t know how effective this will be and how quickly things will right themselves. We do know over time the American machine works wonderfully and it will work wonderfully again.

SG: But are we creating new problems?

WB: Always."

Man, if there is any guy that I would love to have a beer with and pick his brain, this is the guy.

Warren, if you're out there, anytime you want to head out to a minor league ballgame and have some dinner and just gab about whatever, you give me a call and it's on me.

I bet the richest man in the world gets tired of picking up the tab all the time. And I swear to God a night of chit-chat with you would be worth it.

And it has not a lick to do with money.

A question of first principles

Jacob Weisberg has a valuable and insightful criticism of what I believe is an admirable and thoughtful quality on the part of President Obama: his grounded sense of pragmatism on questions of governance.

Obama's Big-Picture Problem

"In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama framed the issue in terms of simple efficacy. 'The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified,' he said. 'Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.'

This view is in keeping with Obama's non-ideological approach to politics. To most of those listening, it came across as an expression of our new president's unsentimental good sense. Yet on rereading the speech in the less euphoric light of the next day, that passage seemed insufficient as a governing philosophy. "Whatever works' is less a vision of the public sector's proper role than a placeholder for someone who has yet to figure out what he thinks that role should be.

Obama's pragmatic liberalism risks blurring execution with intention, means with ends. To take his illustrations, it is either up to the commonweal to provide a minimum income to retired people, to offer health insurance to everybody and to increase income equality—or it isn't. Most liberals would say these are legitimate responsibilities of government. Most conservatives would argue they aren't. On income security for the elderly, we've had a social consensus since the New Deal. On health care, a consensus may be emerging after decades of national ambivalence. When it comes to growing income inequality, a newer problem, there is no consensus. But Obama must decide what government's goals are before considering the subordinate questions of what works and how much we can afford.

Obama's vagueness about the federal role comes at a moment when clarity is especially needed. Our government is about to become bigger, more powerful and more expensive in order to deal with a sprawling economic crisis. Washington will take on responsibilities it hasn't shouldered in 75 years, such as directly alleviating unemployment and perhaps nationalizing banks. Many who would ordinarily reject such interventions on principle can justify them as misery relief, Keynesian stimulus or emergency management. But some see in the expansion something further-reaching—a redefinition of the government's relationship to markets transcending the current crisis.

A president facing this situation needs to know what's temporary and what's permanent, if only because of the tendency for the one to become the other. Urgent measures are liable to stick around long after the precipitating emergency is passed. There aren't many American homes left without electricity, but we retain a renamed version of the Rural Electrification Administration, a program created by Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to modernize a region of the country still afflicted by malaria, remains with us as well. Expanding government is easy, shrinking it nearly impossible.

On the broader question of what Washington should and shouldn't do, Obama remains hard to read. He inclines simultaneously toward activist government and limited government, which is a tension, though not a contradiction. He favors universal health coverage, but without government taking direct responsibility for it. He is poised to propose cutbacks in our most expensive entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, to ensure their survival. Language elsewhere in his Inaugural Address suggests that he sees government as a guarantor of opportunity rather than a provider of benefits, more Clinton's way than LBJ's.

But as he navigates the crisis, Obama would do well to figure out what he thinks about the fundamental question of government's responsibilities. He might begin by pondering some words of his role model, Abraham Lincoln, who in 1854 wrote, 'The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.' Obama's test of practicality comes after Lincoln's test of principle."

It is a wise observation for what looks, at this point, like equally wise, if ever imperfect, leadership from our new President.

I have some suggestions for the new President. I'm sure many people do.

The test of leadership that Barack Obama is likely to pass, I believe, is will he listen with an open heart and an open mind?

That is the test for all Americans, right now. It is the test of our faith in our liberal values, our independent consciences, and ourselves.

And it is a test that, every day, I grow more confident that we will pass.

Underestimating people

The older I get and the more I grow up, the more I get to know people, the more I really value the people in my life, the more I come to conclusion that I and all of us generally far underestimate the people in our lives, not overestimate them.

Especially as adults, I think we become scared, when people disappoint us, that the world is full of danger and people are not worthy of our trust.

But the older I get, the more I get to know people, the more I appreciate that most people really are doing their best, even when their best seems kind of lousy. Most people want to be challenged to be better, in my experience, as long as they can be respected for who they are, what they think, how they feel, and the unique person they are.

It's one of the most incredible opportunities that teaching offers me: the opportunity to get to know the unique and richly layered individuals that most people are, even when they aren't always making the choices that others might approve of or appreciate.

Most of the time we underestimate ourselves and one another, not overestimate one another. It's a shame.

Because there is so much goodness out there in the world.