It's not rocket science, the problem is just money
Last night I agreed to go for dinner with a close friend and his Stanford GSB (business school) friends to Home Restaurant in San Francisco. I haven't seen such antagonism in several years. I had a simple point. Those of us who have personal money and/or access to vast amounts of capital need to use that capital today to help alleviate some of the problems in the rest of the world (or for that matter in our own backyard).
And if they are not, which appears to be the case, then we need to figure out ways to strongly encourage that. Maybe foundations need to be forced to give away a greater percentage of their endowments each year. Maybe we need to have more incentives for people who give their money to charities. I don't have the answers. Yet.
I hope the folks at dinner last night read the AP report this morning in the New York Times on the United Nations World Summit for Sustainable Development. It puts things in perspective and focuses on how the AIDS epidemic is causing a downward spiral on so many different fronts:
The pandemic is reducing life expectancies, devastating families and destroying economies, according to a report UNAIDS released Thursday in an effort to emphasize how crucial the AIDS fight is to development.
``AIDS increases poverty, there's no doubt about that,'' Piot said. [This is because] AIDS, which disproportionately affects adults of working age, is killing millions of productive workers in some of the world's poorest countries. Business costs there are rising because of constant absenteeism and the cost of training workers to replace those that have died.
...Last year U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, hoping it could raise $7 billion of the estimated $10 billion needed annually to tackle those diseases. But only $2 billion has been pledged to the fund so far -- and most of those pledges are one-shot deals.
``It's not rocket science, the problem is just money,'' said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. ``If every person in the rich world would just spend dlrs 10 a year for the global fund, we would have dlrs 10 billion a year.''