from the What-does-Bill-want-to-read-today? dept.
No titles from Microsoft Press, or even Manning, made the cut for Bill Gates' favorite books of 2014. That's probably because these days, Gates is more interested in solving the world's problems than in hacking tight code in the basement, or beating competitors into the ground, although an old collection of business articles from the New Yorker (newly back in print, which enabled its consideration) did make the cut. Not surprisingly, Thomas Piketty's controversial Capital was in there, as well as a book on Asian growth economies and one on the economics of raw materials. As for fiction, there is a second novel featuring the antics of a couple in academia - written by a man who happens to have co-authored a well-known textbook on data modeling.
Back lists:
Gates' favorite books of 2013
Gates' favorite books of 2012
(Score: 1) by aristarchus on Sunday December 14 2014, @05:24AM
You mean, Bill Gates can actually read? And actually does?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @10:29AM
Bill Gates is so rich and powerful he pays Stephen Hawking to read to him. It's expensive and slow but it's worth it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Sunday December 14 2014, @06:26AM
Seriously, I don't know why people care what books this guy likes. Just because he was lucky and had very well-off parents doesn't mean that the literature he partakes in is any kind of good recommendation. The line about him hacking was also a big laugh. As if he was ever very code literate in the first place. Frankly, in terms of great technical stuff I would much rather find out what Prof. Knuth reads or perhaps Wozniak. ESR already gives reviews/recommendations [ibiblio.org] of books he likes. Mostly sci-fi. Yes I know that ignorant people have this "What did ESR ever do" mentality but even then what he has to say about literature is a hell of a lot more insightful and useful than Gates.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @09:33AM
Random AC concurs. My brother bought "The Road Ahead" and worships at the altar of Gates, although fuck knows why.
If you don't like him, though, be prepared for a "You're just jealous of his money!" line thrown in your face. Except, of course, I wouldn't want his money.
I'd quite like a little money, but not too much. Too much wealth concentrated in too few places will topple our societies....
but that's beside the point. I think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @12:25PM
Except, of course, I wouldn't want his money.
bahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @10:54PM
If you had that kind of money, what would you do with it?
After my bills are paid, I have to think a bit for something on which to spend more money.
The notion of having so much money that you can't figure out a way to blow it all is such a universal thing that the same idea gets made into a movie with each new generation.
Brewster's Millions [google.com]
I see the pursuit of extreme wealth as a dick-measuring contest for guys with extremely small dicks.
Do you have a plan to re-shape the world that requires extreme wealth?
N.B. Gates' "charity" is just Neoliberalism and tax-dodging writ large.
...or do you just want people constantly begging you for money?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday December 14 2014, @03:14PM
I googled around for Wozniak favorite book and found "Wozniak loved to read; his favorite books were about Tom Swift, Jr."
I'll be damned, I read the same books as a kid. both the old-old series (motorcycle etc), the old series (triphibian atomicar etc), and the 80s pulp series with the space aliens.
I was unsuccessful in finding anything recent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @11:10PM
The line about him hacking was also a big laugh.
He is actually semi decent at it. I suggest you read up on him before you throw stones.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html [joelonsoftware.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#BASIC [wikipedia.org]
http://wiki.osdev.org/FAT [osdev.org]
He also happens to be one of the more ruthless businessmen you will ever meet.
To deride him is to belittle your enemy. He is extremely wealthy and very cunning. He would have been a very competent programmer at any organization he landed in.
I am not really a fan. But I can at least respect what he has accomplished.
Woz is a great hardware bender. His code is at least as good as Gates. Knuth is amazing at what he does because he takes great pride in it 'being right' at the cost of 'its done'. To compare them is like comparing a picaso to a renoir to a da vinci. All very good but very different stylistically.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday December 15 2014, @01:42AM
I'm aware of the BASIC implementation and FAT. His biggest accomplishment in either was showing just how much of a liar people are willing to be about products they've been hired to work on. It also shows how much of an ignorant little weasel he is with that infamous letter of his. I belittle him because he doesn't deserve anything less and I don't consider him my enemy. I consider him another highly overrated con artist similar to Steve Jobs. I don't know why people think he's hot shit because he did what every other decent manager does and read a spec proposal thoroughly or actually rushed something out the door so that an interested company had something tangible to look at.
and honestly it shows just how overrated he is that people think his sociopathic tendencies reflect a cunning or ruthless business acumen (he was ruthless, but not in the business-compliment sort of way which I will cede to. But again in the sociopathic way). Tell me, if a contractor were to tell you that they had implemented a complex spec and had it ready to go and when the day of the demo came they hacked up a semi-complete prototype and you could tell it was such. Would you call this contractor a decent programmer and ruthless businessman? I sure as hell wouldn't and companies don't either. They call them lowest bid fodder. Because that's pretty much what they are.
Regarding Knuth and Wozniak, yes they are quite different. That's exactly why I'm way more interested in what they read. Gates is the epitome of generic-suit-that-writes-spreadsheets-sometimes. This can be reflected in what he's reading really.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @03:19AM
I'm not a fan of his business ethics, but it's hard to deny that since he retired from the MS CEO's job he's taken his job as philanthropist (using his own money) very seriously and has produced good results. Where the results have been mixed, what he's done has still been very useful for data collection purposes.
And there's little doubt that Gates was *always* a great reader of nonfiction, even growing up he's reputed to have studied multiple biographies of Napolean. And it became clear that he also studied and emulated the US robber barons of the 19th century - those bios aren't even in print, he had to go ferret them out in the pre-Internet days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @03:00AM
I started to kind of like Bill Gates after reading this email:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ [seattlepi.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @03:04AM
Bezos does the same. At Amazon, folks dread receiving customer support emails forwarded from Bezos, with the addition of the line
?
Jeff
(Score: 1) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 14 2014, @08:10AM
Because I care more about that than what Billy Boy wants to read.
And I don't care at all what Oprah is reading.
I guess I need to submit more articles.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday December 14 2014, @12:09PM
Yes you do, but please make them tech related ones. There's enough Hugh Pickens crap here to drive me back to slashdot.
Ultimatly SN doesn't need to post a dozen items a day. If there's something interestingly technological post it. If not, don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @12:23PM
you could always chip in by submitting the odd article too
...or you could just mooch off the voluntary efforts of others and whine when they don't meet your expectations
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Sunday December 14 2014, @12:44PM
...or you could just mooch off the voluntary efforts of others and whine when they don't meet your expectations
To quote SteveD from some boardgame forum: "This is the Internet -- that's what we *DO* around here."
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 14 2014, @07:21PM
you could always chip in by submitting the odd article too
...or you could just mooch off the voluntary efforts of others and whine when they don't meet your expectations
You're absolutely right, AC. Since I've never done that.
I should just drop everything else in my life and post articles to SN fuil-time. Thanks for helping me see the light.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @09:04PM
takes a minute to turn something you're likely reading anyway into a submission to share with others (from personal experience)
it probably took as much time out of your life to come up with your pointless snarky reply that adds absolutely no value to the discussion or community
your thanks (however sarcastic) might mean something if i thought for a moment you had actually seen the light, but it has apparently whooshed right over you
on topic: bill gates is actually a very smart businessman and many would pay to find out what books he's interested in
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 14 2014, @09:09PM
Takes a minute to turn something you're likely reading anyway into a submission to share with others (from personal experience)
it probably took as much time out of your life to come up with your pointless snarky reply that adds absolutely no value to the discussion or community
your thanks (however sarcastic) might mean something if i thought for a moment you had actually seen the light, but it has apparently whooshed right over you
I understand. You are right. the four accepted submissions I've posted in the last seven days clearly aren't enough.
I guess I just need to buckle down and start putting a little effort. I'm such a waste of space. I bet you've had at least 30 or 40 accepted articles in the past week. I suck in comparison, AC.
As for my "snarky" reply. If you don't like what I write, don't read it. Have a great day!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 14 2014, @09:13PM
on topic: bill gates is actually a very smart businessman and many would pay to find out what books he's interested in
On topic then. Just because someone is well-known, wealthy or otherwise has some notoriety doesn't mean that they have any particular value or expertise in anything other than what caused their notoriety.
I *might* be interested in what a published author or noted literary critic is reading. Then again, I might not. As to whether someone would pay for information about what Billy Boy reads, I think that old saw often (incorrectly) attributed to P.T. Barnum applies.
Again, Have a lovely day!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @10:51PM
If the system worked, he would be in prison.
Sherman Antitrust Act [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday December 14 2014, @04:48PM
Not surprisingly, Thomas Piketty's controversial Capital [gatesnotes.com] was in there
From the link there's this bit of discussion:
For all of Piketty’s data on historical trends, he does not give a full picture of how wealth is created and how it decays. At the core of his book is a simple equation: r > g, where r stands for the average rate of return on capital and g stands for the rate of growth of the economy. The idea is that when the returns on capital outpace the returns on labor, over time the wealth gap will widen between people who have a lot of capital and those who rely on their labor. The equation is so central to Piketty’s arguments that he says it represents “the fundamental force for divergence” and “sums up the overall logic of my conclusions.”
Other economists have assembled large historical datasets and cast doubt on the value of r > g for understanding whether inequality will widen or narrow. I’m not an expert on that question. What I do know is that Piketty’s r > g doesn’t adequately differentiate among different kinds of capital with different social utility.
Imagine three types of wealthy people. One guy is putting his capital into building his business. Then there’s a woman who’s giving most of her wealth to charity. A third person is mostly consuming, spending a lot of money on things like a yacht and plane. While it’s true that the wealth of all three people is contributing to inequality, I would argue that the first two are delivering more value to society than the third. I wish Piketty had made this distinction, because it has important policy implications, which I’ll get to below.
I really didn't get the point of this criticism. If I have much more wealth than average to the point that I'm distorting the tail of wealth distribution, then sure, I am contributing to wealth inequity by my mere existence. But all three behaviors described would be expected to reduce wealth inequity since for the latter two, there is a transfer of wealth to those with less of it or in the case of the person investing in their business, an increasing demand for capital, making its yield decline relative to labor (higher yield for capital than labor being the alleged primary source of wealth inequity).
But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption. Think about the three wealthy people I described earlier: One investing in companies, one in philanthropy, and one in a lavish lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with the last guy, but I think he should pay more taxes than the others. As Piketty pointed out when we spoke, it's hard to measure consumption (for example, should political donations count?). But then, almost every tax system—including a wealth tax—has similar challenges.
Like Piketty, I’m also a big believer in the estate tax. Letting inheritors consume or allocate capital disproportionately simply based on the lottery of birth is not a smart or fair way to allocate resources. As Warren Buffett likes to say, that’s like “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.” I believe we should maintain the estate tax and invest the proceeds in education and research—the best way to strengthen our country for the future.
I disagree. Buying luxury is a very efficient way to transfer money from someone who has too much to the rest of society. Taxing luxury has in the past meant transferring those purchases to other countries which have smaller luxury taxes. For example, luxury boat building has moved from the US to countries like Turkey over the past forty years. That in turn has contributed to the wealth inequity issues in parts of the developed world where societies attempted to punish conspicuous consumption.
We also ignore that a large class of luxury spending is charity spending. For example, there's a lot of notorious politically oriented donations which in theory has some benefit to the donor, but in practice is just spending money for status. For example, there's Koch brothers' contributions to libertarian and certain reactionary causes, George Soros's contributions to liberal causes, or Michael Bloomberg's recent contributions to gun control advocacy. Or the century old practice of giving a lot of money to your alma mater and having them name a building after you.
IMHO economics has demonstrated that there's little point to casting most economic behaviors and decisions in a moral light. As I indicate above, a shallow self-centered wealthy person isn't going to spend less money on luxuries just because you're taxing them. They'll just spend the money on luxuries you can't tax. That makes inequity worse than if you hadn't cared about luxury consumption in the first place. It's also worth noting that luxury taxes also tend to be rather regressive. For example, luxury consumption by poor people (particularly, the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes, and travel - gas taxes and hotel taxes) tends to be taxed rather heavily. Sure, the wealthy person could be doing more valuable things for society, but they could also be doing less valuable things for society. Local luxury spending gives an outlet for the shallow to contribute to society.
Second, an asset tax has a powerful advantage over an estate tax. In the future, it's reasonable to expect that the rich will live much longer than the poor, say, 200 years of life span versus 100 years, let's suppose. Current estate taxes are based on the assumption that the average extremely wealthy person will live perhaps to 80 or so. If instead, they live to 200, then they're paying a much lower estate tax. 40% every 200 years is far less than 40% ever 80 years (the latter being effectively over 70% taxes paid on assets every 200 years). But the latter rate is equivalent to a roughly 0.7% tax on assets every year. Transitioning from estate taxes to annual asset taxes would reduce the harm of this source of wealth inequity.
Asset taxes are also far more predictable. Rather than having a financial disaster happen just because a wealthy person died unexpectedly, it's a continual, steady, predictable tax. That's good for the business and for the government collecting the revenue. It also eliminates any incentive to off rich people in order to generate tax revenue.
An significant disadvantage is that there's at least one major country, the US, where nation-wide asset taxes are currently illegal. It would require a constitutional amendment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @05:02PM
I agree, the consumption tax that Gates proposes is very regressive. Personally I favor restoration of higher income tax rates on the top brackets, up to 50 percent for people earning over $1 million/yr, which of course includes most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Over time, I expect that that would lead to a pullback in the routine 8 figure salaries these guys and gals get.
Gates obviously spent a lot of time reading and re-reading Piketty's book, that's why it's on the list. Not because BG agrees with Piketty's recommendations.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday December 14 2014, @10:57PM
Personally I favor restoration of higher income tax rates on the top brackets, up to 50 percent for people earning over $1 million/yr, which of course includes most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Over time, I expect that that would lead to a pullback in the routine 8 figure salaries these guys and gals get.
It does little about the wealth they already have. Throw it all into a trust like the wealthy of the US past did when faced with high income taxes.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 15 2014, @05:26PM
What this post has brought to my attention is that Bill Gates is really starting to look old. He always had a bit of a youthful charm to him at least from the pictures. He really looks old now...
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"