By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.

I hope corporations will dedicate a percentage of their top innovators' time to issues that could help people left out of the global economy. This kind of contribution is even more powerful than giving cash or offering employees' time off to volunteer. It is a focused use of what your company does best. It is a great form of creative capitalism, because it takes the brainpower and makes life better for the richest, and dedicates some of it to improving the lives of everyone else.

here are economies like China's economy where it's less than a tenth [of a percent] today, although it is growing, is quite small, because of the notion that the government takes care of everything, and Europe and China, philanthropy has not been nearly of the same scale.

There was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called a "fast reactor," that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium, and then you would pull that out, and then you would burn that. That's called "breeding" in a fast reactor. That is bad because plutonium is nuclear weapons material. It's messy. The processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficultly, it's extremely expensive.

I mean, if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life, you know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that.

I could name about a dozen paths, and you'd like to have a whole bunch of research on all those paths, and then, eventually, at least four to five companies with really significant financing try and get to big scale, going down and really trying to prove it out.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.