THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BILL GATES

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and for years the world's
wealthiest man, is a full-time philanthropist. In 2008, Mr. Gates
walked away from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft and shifted
his energies to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose goals
are curing the world's fatal diseases and improving American
education.
Mr. Gates, a Harvard dropout, was an animating force behind the
personal computer revolution, helping to build a huge global
industry and engineer blockbuster products like Windows and
Office, used every day in offices and homes around the world.
When Mr. Gates spoke about his philanthropy to the Harvard
graduating class of 2007, his speech echoed the language of
Microsoft, focusing on finding the ''ideal technology'' with the right
''application'' to tackle problems like malaria. Yet experience has
taught Mr. Gates and others that, compared with government
budgets, even their vast fortunes are a drop in the bucket.
When he began his philanthropic life more than a decade ago, Mr.
Gates was driven by his conviction that providing incentives for
pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for the diseases of
the poor world would be enough to avoid millions of deaths. He
did not give much thought to the practicalities of getting health
care systems in poor countries to deliver the drugs and educate
the needy to use them. Likewise, he assumed that if his giving
succeeded in developing a better sort of school for deprived urban
areas in America, then that model would be widely adopted
without his having to think about the political economy of
education reform.
That was before he went full time at the helm of his foundation,
which grew sharply in 2006 when Warren E. Buffett announced
that he would contribute $31 billion, most of his immense fortune.
Since then, Mr. Gates has devoted a growing amount of his time
and his public speaking to calling for political change: one day
making the economic case for American taxpayers to keep
investing in global health, the next urging Arne Duncan, the
education secretary, to stay true to the path of change despite the
opposition of the teachers' unions.
Meanwhile, the Gateses have treated their charitable contributions
like venture capital investments. They seek programs that can be
catalysts for broad changes in fields like health, education and the
environment, they measure performance and results, and they
encourage nonprofits to become more self-sustaining.
To that end, Mr. Gates is investing $335 million to overhaul the
personnel departments of several big school systems. A big
chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social
scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system
for evaluating classroom instruction. The effort will have
enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and
educators more accountable for student achievement.