frustrations with the American system, and said he believes education and lowering health care costs are big parts of the answer.
“If you really look at where we’re letting people down in terms of the American Dream, I wouldn’t say—and you can say this is self-serving—I wouldn’t say it’s because a few people are very rich. I’d say it’s because we aren’t doing a good job on education to give them an opportunity to move up into the top few percent,” Gates said.
“In terms of the very rich, Warren and I—Warren Buffett and I are the two wealthiest Americans— are certainly believing that the rich should be taxed a lot more … and the rich should give away more wealth than they currently do. And we’ve certainly been wiling to speak out about that,” Gates said.
“You can be very frustrated with the political system. I certainly am myself right now. I was in Washington, D.C., Monday and Tuesday meeting with members of the House and talking about things like cutting science budgets is not the way to keep the country strong,” he said. “I don’t know exactly why politics feels so frustrating right now. It certainly worked well up to now, and so maybe the system will realize the problems that it has there.”
TECH AND LIFE
A student raised worries about kids growing up in a technology-saturated age having a dulled ability to interact with others, but Gates said that was a typical worry and said his parents had to give him a reading quota to keep him from spending too much time with his nose buried in books.
“Whenever a new technology comes along, there’s a lot of fear about what it’s going to do. When the printing press came along, there was a great fear that people would just read books and not go out and seek real experiences,” Gates said. “I tried that when I was a kid, just reading books. And maybe I’d be more rounded if there hadn’t been books around,” he said to laughs.
(I wondered whether this was a reference to comments in Steve Jobs’ new biography, where the late Apple co-founder said Gates was unimaginative and would be “a broader guy” if he had taken LSD or traveled the world more?)
“I haven’t seen any evidence that socialization has really broken down in some bad way. I know that with Skype now, I meet my daughter’s boyfriend’s parents when I walk into her bedroom and there they are on Skype,” Gates said. “So, socialization is changing, but I’m not sure that you can really say that there’s a negative vector there. And there’s so many positive vectors about
