Effective charity

Warren E. Buffett even knows how to get the biggest bank per buck when it comes to charity: he's giving the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is a man with a plan. He has figured out where his charity dollars will have the biggest effect and he's heading up the implementation. Gates isn't the most appealing of personalities, but so what. What matters is that he's good at what does, and these days that's doing good. It shows what sort of person Buffett is that he knows that he can do the most good by handing over control of so much of his wealth to the Gates Foundation.

Here's a bit on Gates' plan.

Sorry to say it, but the UN and other large international and government agencies just aren't very good at allocation of funds to programs that will have the greatest effect, nor are they good at carrying out a plan. In the world as it is a competent and benevolent dictator is the best form of benevolence available.

Speaking of which here's another example:

Dr. Arata Kochi, the new chief of the World Health Organization's global malaria program, has turned an enfilading fire on the whole field: the drug-makers, the net-makers, the scientists and even the donors and the suffering countries they try to help.

"The malaria community hates me," Dr. Kochi said in an interview in the W.H.O.'s small Manhattan office. "I said, basically, 'You are stupid.' Their science is very weak. The community is small and inward-looking and fighting each other."

Dr. Kochi, who in the past ran the agency's Stop TB initiative, has never been known for his diplomatic skills. A 57-year-old graduate of Japanese medical schools and the Harvard School of Public Health, he ruled the Stop TB campaign with an iron fist, colleagues say, and by his own admission, so alienated the Rockefeller Foundation and other partners that he was ultimately forced out of the job.

But even his critics admit that he was a decisive strategist and that the tuberculosis campaign was one of most effective the W.H.O. has run.

"His tactic really worked," said Dr. Jacob Kumaresan, a former chief of the Stop TB Partnership in Geneva and now the president of the International Trachoma Initiative. "With his staff, he's pretty strict — those who don't produce results will be laid off. But he's very bold, and I think he's on the right track."

The tuberculosis world, Dr. Kochi said, used to be just as fragmented and hostile as the malaria field is now.

Then you have Myth No. 4: The silent killer; the absence of DDT. See also: ddtfaq and this (Instapundit has been malariablogging (DDTblogging) since the beginning.)

But environmentalists don't want to concede that they were wrong on this one. Buffett could give them a lesson in not letting pride get in the way of achieving real results.

Perhaps pride isn't the word for it. Rather, it may be that environmentalists don't want to concede because they fear losing credibility. Well, continuing to defend the case for banning DDT isn't helping your credibility campaign; it's hurting.