I don’t much like Bill Gates’ business practices, which slip into anti-competitive, “crush the competition by whatever means we can” territory sometimes. But I can’t deny that he’s one of the biggest philanthropists (at least in dollar amounts) around. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives lots of money to education and health initiatives, following the principle of teaching people to fish instead of just giving them a fish once. Give every American $10,000, and some of them will know how to use it to pull themselves out of poverty. But others would just spend it too fast and be back where they started, no better off in the long run. (It happened with Katrina victims — some of them wasted their recovery money on frivolities like bigscreen TV’s). Investing in education is a better approach, because the better educated you are, the more job prospects open up to you.