Gapminder: Statistics in visual form

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

I just discovered that Gapminder has collaborated with Google to make their statistics visualizations available online. You can spend hours looking for trends and patterns…

Causing Harm to do Good (Part 2)

Money clashes with mission

The Gates Foundation invests heavily in sub-prime lenders and other businesses that undercut its good works

By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
January 8, 2007

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This series of articles requires that we look carefully at the purpose of philanthopy and its role in the greater context of world politics and the world economy. How can an institution like the Gates Foundation best influence the factors that determine health? Vaccines and programs run by expats certainly look and feel good, and it is difficult to speak negatively of those who work to save lives. But the upstream factors that foster disease are the more difficult ones to change, and the more controversial.

The Gates Foundation is in an excellent position to address the political and economic forces that create and sustain poverty – by pressuring, as stockholders, the corporations that clearly harm local people, or by publicly divesting from these companies. The Gates Foundation is in the ideal position to do this, as they are extremely well known and are not likely to run out of money due to a decrease in investment returns.

Modern philanthropy has been with us a century or so, yet the gap between the haves and have-nots is growing, and injustice still reigns. I await the foundation’s response to this series of articles somewhat anxiously, as it seems to me a test of whether we humans who have unprecedented power and resources can make the hard choices about our future, and not just do the “good deeds” that make us feel good and caring.

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UPDATE:

Gates Foundation states that it will not change investment practices in order to take into account social impacts of companies.

Causing Harm to do Good

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

The world’s largest philanthropy pours money into investments that are hurting many of the people its grants aim to help.

By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writers
6:51 PM PST, January 6, 2007