Yesterday our friendly reader Raj reacted with outrage to the post about Bill Gates telling poor people around the world to improve their lot in life by raising chickens. Raj said the source was a disreputable British rag, and I should be ashamed for referring to such “sensational” claims.
To satisfy Raj’s curiosity (and my own), I did a wee bit of Internet research, and in four seconds, I found the original source of the story: it was an article written by Bill Gates.
The guy with $70 billion says if he were poor, he would raise chickens.
Now don’t get get me wrong. Raising chickens is a swell thing to do, and I donate to the Heifer Fund to help buy animals for people in poverty. Of course, I can’t raise chickens myself because I live in an apartment building, and it is probably against the house rules to raise chickens in an apartment. Also, I am not poor, so he wasn’t talking to me.
Bill Gates is different from me. He has about $70 billion. World leaders listen to him. I would expect him to have more fully developed ideas about how to reduce poverty. There is a big difference between abject poverty and subsistence. Maybe raising chickens would help large numbers of people live at a subsistence level.
But with Gates’ billions and his huge staff, I expected deep thinking about the structural nature of poverty. Not chickens.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for the idea Bill. We never would have thought of this ourselves!
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I bet raising motorcycles is more profitable.
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I guess billionaires like Gates spend little time traveling through impoverished areas. His suggestion is beyond condescending.
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Here come the Common Core Chicken Copulation Competencies.
What? Surely there has to be a way for Gates to profit from his idea-hatching.
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The Common Coop?
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or maybe the Common Poop?
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This is a great example of how he approaches problems: clueless and myopic.
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Instead he opted to sheer sheep …
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(ed) shear
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Imagine how many chickens Bill Gates could have bought for people living in poverty around the world with the billions he has spent to destroy and/or control public education in the U.S. and even other countries.
For instance, there was the $250 million Gates threw away on his small high schools project that he abandoned after blaming his project’s failure on the teachers’ unions – you know those democratic organizations that teachers belong to. It is obvious that autocrats like Bill Gates and Donald Trump hate anything democratic that gets in their way. When an autocrat doesn’t get what he/she wants, just blame it on the democratic teachers’ unions that keep protecting incompetent public school teachers, you know, the 1% to 3% of all teachers that the two Harvard experts who testified at the Vergara trial guessed existed in the public schools.
I imagine Gates throwing himself on the floor and kicking his feet as he complains when he doesn’t get his way in a scene simliar to the one in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo throws a tantrum and threatens to take his own life in front of Friar Lawrence because Romeo is having trouble seducing Juliet, a girl he just met for the first time the night before and tried to seduce on her balcony not long after they both learned each others’ names.
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He could have paid for heifers, goats and wells for millions of poor people, if his goal were to help, for what he has spent to attack public education. He’d rather pontificate from on high or figure out a way to profit from them.
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Ah, but there are those who support Gates and claim he isn’t in it for the profit but wants to give all his money away.
For supporters of Bill Gates that think he is a saint that can do no wrong, I want to oint out that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and the foundation had an endowment of more than $44 billion in December 2014.
The scale of the foundation and the way it seeks to apply business techniques to giving makes it one of the leaders in venture philanthropy, though the foundation itself notes that the philanthropic role has limitations.
The foundation has made $36.5 billion in grant payments since inception.
Any Gates worshipers out there please explain how Bill Gates was worth only $25.6 billion in 2000, he gave away $36.5 billion in grants through his foundation, and in 2015, his net worth was up to $79.4 billion.
Before you answer, remember that his foundation is a venture philanthropy that limits its philanthropic role.
To help any of Gates worshipers that might be reading this, “Philanthropic funds are common among the super-rich in the US; they enable tax avoidance provided five per cent of net investment assets are given away annually. What quickly set Gates’ fund apart was its orientation towards the poor – rather than élite culture or religion – and its sheer size.”
https://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/
What Bill Gates is doing isn’t about giving his money away to do good, it’s about making greed look good to fool as many people as possible.
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“While Kimmelman (co-founder of Bridge International Academies) knew that the company’s social mission was attractive, he also knew that the ROI, about 20% annualized would be quite attractive to investors as well.” (Harvard Business Review, Sept. 27, 2010, Rangan and Lee.) BIA investors include Pearson, according to the WSJ and, Bill Gates and Mark Z-berg, according to the BIA website.
David Koch and Madelyn Albright, on the Aspen Board, overseeing the Gates-funding of Aspen’s Education and Society programs, including Pahara and the Senior Congressional Education Staff Network, is evidence of a clear and present danger to American democracy.
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I neither worship nor hate Bill Gates and the GF. I am an observer of how his foundation and its projects are portrayed and analyzed, and I think open-minded analyses that take into account an understanding of GF grants–where they go and what they aim to do, for better or worse–are lacking.
I’m interested by the cognitive dissonance that happens when, for example, Gates blogs about an idea that is the basis for the $25.5 million grant the GF has awarded to Heifer International. Folks can ridicule the blog essay while acknowledging HI does good work and is worthy of donations. Is that because they don’t know about the grant? Or because the grant is automatically bad because it comes from GF? If the latter, should folks stop donating to HI because HI accepted a substantial GF grant?
The increase in Gates’s personal wealth (separate from the foundation’s endowment) since 2000 shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone who has stayed in the stock market, riding out its crash in 2008 and its subsequent recovery. The value of my retirement investments, in index funds, has soared in the last few years because I bought more when the markets tanked and have profited from the recovery.
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Lucia,
While you are at it, would you try to justify Bill Gates’ investments of close to $3 billion (could be more) in breaking up large high schools, evaluating teachers by test scores, and privatizing public education by charters. And be sure to address the way he personally bankrolled the attack on Washington state’s efforts to protect public education.
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I would not try to justify GF’s investments in charter schools. I by no means support them. Nor do I support VAM.
As I said, I’m neither a GF hater nor worshipper.
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Your thoughts- Is Bill Gates, a paltry giver, his venture-giving returns more, to him, than it costs or, his concentrated wealth prevents his goal achievement-to give away his fortune in his lifetime? Despite the Gates PR, he hasn’t moved down, even one rung, from richest man, in twenty years of “giving”.
To answer your question, based on my opinion, everything Gates touches is tainted, much like the Koch’s. I hope Jane Mayer, next writes about Gates.
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“Folks can ridicule the blog essay while acknowledging HI does good work and is worthy of donations. Is that because they don’t know about the grant? Or because the grant is automatically bad because it comes from GF? ”
Neither..
Your logic is flawed.
The problem is not that Gates gives grants for worthy causes like Heifer. And of course that does not mean people should stop giving money to Heifer.
The problem (which should be obvious to anyone who actually read what Diane said) is the presumption by Gates that he has all the answers on nearly every subject (education, vaccines, malaria, toilets, poverty, etc. You name it, Gates has an “expert” solution)
Who really cares what Gates thinks about chickens? If he wants to give Heifer International money, great, but why does he have to say anything?
It makes no difference what he thinks.
Heifer was doing good things (and some of us were donating money to them) long before Bill Gates gave them a grant and they will undoubtedly be doing good things long after he is gone.
Finally, your presumption that you are some sort of “neutral” observer and that somehow gives you a more valid view on this subjet is just ridiculous.
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or the better question is “Why should anyone care what Bill Gates says about chickens?” any more than they care what he says about education?
The guy has a rather long track record of weighing in on — and acting on — things about which he is woefully ignorant. This has had profound negative (sometimes tragic) implications for the people affected by his actions.
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Lucia: ” Or because the grant is automatically bad because it comes from GF?”
Yes. Unless supported by prior evidence of not causing any harm, any major philanthropy funding of some project (better call them experiments) is bad.
In case of chickens: do we know for a fact that the chicken experiment doesn’t cause any harm in the long(er) run?
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Why would Gates concern himself with the structural nature of poverty? He is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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(Au contraire, Diane. Bill Gates has great ideas about poverty.)
How To Reduce Poverty by Bill Gates
Cell phones. Credit cards. Robot pay toilets. Charter schools. Standardized testing. VAM. Outsourcing. Foxconn factories. Big Data. Genetic modification. Genetic experimentation. Technocracy. Techno-meritocracy. …And chickens with antibiotics.
(See? And “Let them raise chickens” is way way better than “Let them eat cake”.)
(We finally have the answer to the question. Why did the chicken cross the road? Bill Gates paid a government official to subsidize it.)
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A real solution to global poverty would involve billionaires surrendering 90% of their hoarded cash.
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You’re all so negative!
At least he didn’t tell them to eat cake…
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Negative? About Bill Gates? I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Common Core? Microsoft Office, maybe? Waiting for Superman? Just spitballing.
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Nah, it’s just that everyone here is a Hater…
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That was positive. We all here thank you for not being negative. You know what, that does it, sir. You have convinced me. Gatesocracy is grand. Everything the multibillionaire does through his private foundation is super duper. He is not a bad person just because of some slips with anti-trust laws or democratic governance. He is a model person. I wish I were just like him.
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Not only does he advocate that the poor raise chickens…he advocates that the poor raise HIS genetically modified chickens. He also partook in genetically modifying mosquitos. Well, there is a conspiracy theory going round that these mosquitos are responsible for the zika virus – whether coincidental or not, Gates could have donated mosquito nets, mosquito netted huts, mosquito repellant, etc. and the like, but no, he LOVES PLAYING GOD. Lets not kid ourselves, people, that genetically modifying living things isn’t playing God. Lets also not kid ourselves that Monsanto, with all of its agricultural genetic modifying of seeds, to resist its pesticides, hasn’t been making people ill. Round Up’s main pesticide, Glyphosate, is being found in our body tissue, its being found in breast milk. Gates invested heavily in Monsanto.
Gates doesn’t give a hoot for humanity–he is there to play God, to tell the rest of us how to live, and to move us along like pieces on a chessboard. We are playthings to him because he already shot his best load by stealing Windows and calling it his own. Now, kudos to him b/c we use computers in our daily lives just as naturally now as breathing, and I will hand it to him. Congrats. However, he has come up with nothing new since, and is so intrinsically bored to death with himself that he dabbles in role-play (God) with a return on investment, always, a forethought.
Bill Gates is responsible for at least 40,000 paralyzations in India via his Polio vaccine. Did he make money on that too?
Bill Gates had himself inserted into school tests via an essay about him, and how great he is. What is next? Perhaps Trump or Clinton can choose him as V.P. and they can just about finish us off.
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Confronted with his past statements in favor of reducing the number of people on Earth, he says he longer believes in human population control. How does one change one’s mind about something like that? How does one get an idea like that in the first place? Which Bill Gates should we believe is really in control of Bill Gates?
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It was politically correct for him to denounce his desire for population control. Make no mistake tho, if the government wants to do it, they will go to Bill for advice.
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About those mosquito nets and the like ….
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2005/10/Gates-Foundation-Commits-2583-Million-for-Malaria-Research
and genetically modified mosquitoes and zika:
“A poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in February found more than one-third of Americans believed genetically modified mosquitoes were to blame for the spread of Zika. (They’re not.) Others hear “genetic modification” and they think Jurassic Park; or they believe that just because something is natural, it is somehow better.
“The public fears genetic engineering. Nearly all politicians don’t understand it,” said Arthur Caplan, the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine. “I don’t think the issue is economic. It is ignorance, distrust, fear of the unknown, fear of prior efforts to use biology to combat pests which went sour.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-zika/479793/
Y’all just keep whacking those straw men because it’s easier and a lot more fun than informing yourselves.
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Beyond the risks of side effects, one of the dangers of introducing antibiotic organisms that can reproduce to the Earth’s little, rotating Petri dish is that the organisms they are meant to resist will evolve to overcome them, becoming super-viruses, necessitating super-antibiotics we don’t have. And you just have to admit messing with the genetic structure of flying, biting insects is inherently dangerous, and downright creepy. So is attempting to map intelligence on the human genome while gathering individual student cognitive data.
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I think it’s GREAT that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made some very large donations to the Heifer Project. The Heifer Project is doing great work to alleviate poverty throughout the world.
I don’t like most of the ways Bill Gates has chosen to reform education either. However, I do like what he did last September (or maybe it was the previous year) when the Gates Foundation offered matching grants to fund teacher initiated projects through Donor’s Choose.
Diane, I know YOU like the Heifer Project. I’m sad that you feel it necessary to demonize Bill and Melinda Gates even when they do something that you admit is a good idea.
I hope you will consider making another donation to the Heifer Project, and perhaps consider COMMENDING Bill and Melinda Gates when they do something worthy of praise. Your critiques may have more oomph if you balance them with some praise.
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Let me go all biblical on you. I would wager that Bill’s gifts when compared to those of a poor inner city church pale into insignificance. His “gifts” cost him nothing; gifts from those who know what it is to be hungry and are truly sacrificing when they give are inspiring. He gets the fanfare and far too much praise as it is. Apparently, he takes out of the economy far more than he gives to society. Someone else has said something along the lines of why don’t they just pay their taxes. He would still have more than enough to donate to worthy causes.
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There are two separate issues that some people are conflating here.
One is Heifer International, which no one (not Diane or anyone else) has criticized here. The other is Gates’ know nothing approach to problems.
Heifer has done great work which has been very successful.
It is actually very relevant that the primary reason their projects are successful is that they respect the people they are helping enough to give them the autonomy to make their own decisions regarding the animals with which they are provided.
The difference between the approach of Heifer and that of Gates and his Foundation (eg, on education with Common Core) could not be more profound.
Gates treats the people he is helping as if they are his Kingly “subjects” — to be seen and not heard from. He seems to share David Coleman’s philosophy — does not give a $hi^ what they think or feel — and has no respect for their knowledge and expertise which in the case of teachers is far more than Gates and his entourage of clowns will ever have.
That “mistake” has led to the vast majority of gates’ failures to date.
Criticizing Gates for this failed, ignorant approach is what Diane and others have done here.
This is certainly not a criticism of Heifer International.
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From what I read here, Gates’s “failed, ignorant approach” and Heifer International’s mission are one and the same–which I was I originally commented and why I agree with holly.
Quoting Diane yesterday, “I would have been impressed if Bill gates had said he was giving away 100 million chickens to poor families in Africa, India, and other nations. Send chickens.”
Gates’s blog post was essentially a promotion of HI, and involved his one-day pledge to send 100,000 chickens.
So how many more livestock donations and supporting programs implemented by Heifer International have been realized through Gates Foundation grants? As far as I can tell, there was a grant of $42.8 million in 2008.
http://www.littlerock.org/citymanager/divisions/publicrelations/MediaReleases.aspx?ID=231
and another $25 million in 2014
http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/heifer-international-announces-25.6-million-gates-foundation-grant
There may be more, but perhaps not. I spent more than 4 seconds googling and didn’t find others.
I question the claims that Gates is all about self promotion and pushing his own poorly conceived ideas if his investments in HI were so widely unknown, and the HI’s mission is so readily endorsed.
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Lucia, I am so glad that we finally have someone on the blog who defends Bill Gates day after day!
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Lucia
You obviously have a problem with reading comprehension because Gates’ ignorant, know-nothing approach (in this case to raising people out of poverty) was precisely what Diane was referring to.
Here’s the very first line of Diane’s first post (which also spawned this one):
“Bill Gates knows everything. He even knows how poor people can raise themselves out of poverty. With all his billions, he has become an expert on everything there is to know.”
And the last paragraphs of the above post
“Bill Gates is different from me. He has about $70 billion. World leaders listen to him. I would expect him to have more fully developed ideas about how to reduce poverty. There is a big difference between abject poverty and subsistence. Maybe raising chickens would help large numbers of people live at a subsistence level.
But with Gates’ billions and his huge staff, I expected deep thinking about the structural nature of poverty. Not chickens.”
By the way, you would not happen to be the same “Lucia” (Liljegren) who has been dishonestly downplaying the severity of climate change on the web for years based on cherry picking and (short-term trend) mathturbation, would you?
If so, your cherry picking here doesn’t surprise me cuz that’s what Lucia Liljegren excels at.
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A Harvard-trained (like BIA’s founder), TFA state chair, who was recruited to Donors Choose, as an executive, described charter schools as public schools, in a written response to a complaint about her interview, published in The Miamian (Ohio college alumni magazine). Assets, that taxpayers buy, are owned by charter operators (Ohio Supreme court ruling). It is a deceit to call charter schools, public.
Gates (Microsoft) deserves no credit, nor does anyone else, who avoids taxes. “Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society.”
To expect praise for giving to a “charity” that rakes off an amount on top of the “gifts” people give to underfunded educational projects should be called our for what it is.
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No surprise, that Bill is in the news for liking chickens. The Gates Foundation also likes chickens.
Here are the results from my search for chicken grants.
1. The University of Edinburgh Date: October 2015 Purpose: to support the application of genetics, genomics, informatics, and reproductive biotechnologies to address tropical livestock constraints to increase productivity and adaptability of chickens and dairy cows owned by poor smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa Amount: $16,000,000 Grantee Location: Edinburgh
2. EthioChicken Date: August 2015 Purpose: to enable smallholder farmers in Ethiopia to benefit from improved egg and market weight poultry production through the expansion of superior poultry stock hatching, brooding, and dissemination capabilities Amount: $6,995,603 Grantee Location: Port Louis, Port Louis
3. International Livestock Research Institute Date: November 2014 Purpose: to catalyze a farmer-centric, public-private partnership model for chicken breeding and delivery, with the goal of increasing productivity, reducing poverty, increasing household animal protein intake, and empowering women farmers in rural communities Amount: $10,999,996 Grantee Location: Nairobi
4. Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta Date: October 2014 Purpose: To create stable parental populations of improved high-productive chicken lines for subsequent multiplication and use in low-input production systems by smallholders in West Africa. Amount: $393,140 Grantee Location: Abeokuta, Ogun
5. Arizona State University Foundation for A New American University Date: August 2012 Purpose: to improve the productivity of chickens in Uganda Amount: $2,799,440 Grantee Location: Tempe, Arizona
6. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Date: May 2009 Purpose: to develop a lentiviral vector that targets the entry and replication of influenza viruses in domestic chickens, in order to reduce the frequency of flu epidemics in poultry and ultimately in humans Amount: $100,000 Grantee Location: Hong Kong
7. Chicken Soup Brigade Date: March 1999 Purpose: to provide social services to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS in King County Amount: $100,000 Grantee Location: Seattle, Washington Grantee Website:
From chicken soup kitchen to genetic engineering, the underlying aim in most of these chicken-focused grants is increased productivity.
Why does this resonate with the Gates approach to education?
In fact, Bill Gates’ interest in the “education production function” is not radically different from his chicken work. He financed much of this century’s work in setting standards (Common Core). He has pushed interventions to improve and measure “teacher quality, and he has supported some bizarre ratings schemes as proofs of effective, efficient education of “high quality” (e.g., greatschools.org)
Gates is not the only person with these ideas. In 1970, economist Eric A. Hanushek published “The Production of Education, Teacher Quality, and Efficiency,” (U.S. Office of Education. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, pp. 79-99). Hanushek applied so-called “value-added” measures to test scores, now widely known as VAM and also discredited as a means for evaluation in education. Hanushek has hundreds of publications that support various forms of triage to secure efficiencies in teachers perfomance, lean budgets, all to improve the educational outcomes and the economy.
The person most responsible for making VAM measures popular with politicians is William L. Sanders, a biostatistician, along with his graduate students in genetic engineering. Sanders persuaded then Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander that his statistical methods could identify effective teachers—productive teachers—based on the test scores of their students. http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/1999/11/01/helping-teachers-raise-student-achievement-interview-william-l-sanders
There is clearly some continuity of “mindet” in all this fascination with productivity—seeds, sows, cows, chickens, children in schools, their teachers, and the nation’s economy and targeted global programs.
There is NOT a long inferential leap from the Bill Gates passion for stack ratings—of almost everything in education (especially metrics for teacher and student evaluation) to the social philosophy of eugenics.
This is hardly a new observation. The history of testing for intelligence and preferred attributes in humans is really ugly. The current interest in measuring grit, mindsets, and so-called social-emotional learning as a prelude to managing these through “targeted interventions” strikes me as a renewal of the impulse to think of education as a “benign” version eugenics.
The casual acceptance of these ideas and cheerleading for them as part of the educators “tool kit” for practice, really scares me.
See for example https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/sites/default/files/EDSCLS%20Questionnaires.pdf
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So many citizens show their anger at the open racism inherent to words like “predators” when referring to non-white people, but then blindly ignore the elitist racism behind Philantrhocapitalist endeavors to “fix” the poor.
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Laura and ciedie, I agree.
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I believe Alexander was serving in another capacity when Sanders came up with the value added thing. Lamar was our gov. In 1978-1986 I think.
Sanders is an engaging man I have met and enjoyed talking to. Many years ago, he gave our teachers an explanation of his methods. I asked him how he controlled for poor tests and for differences of opinion about what was appropriate to teach. I think he was genuinely bewildered. He is a nice guy who grew up in our county. I happen to think he was wrong about his method.
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There’s actually a lot of science and psychology behind Bill Gates’ ideas for ending world hunger and improving education around the world. It is all summarized here:
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Thanks for the post. Every time Tilson speaks, Mr. Trololo’s song should run in the background, with the occasional cash register jingle, as refrain.
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America today is suffering from an epidemic of “The Billionaires’ Disease,” and this disease has brought paralysis to our government and ruin to our schools. Most billionaires — with the exception of Warren Buffett — are delusional. They have accumulated great wealth and all the things that go with it, such as being surrounded by sycophants who assure them that they are geniuses at everything. In fact, most billionaires not only believe themselves to be geniuses at everything, but believe that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusion they also think that their self-identified genius can be applied to other areas, such as government and public education, regardless of the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be and what government should or shouldn’t do, and of course they say that what the government shouldn’t do is make corporations pay a fair share of taxes. And there are billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed is the charter school business model that bleeds tax money from genuine public schools and puts public taxpayer money into the pockets of private charter school operators who don’t file the same reports that true public schools file to tell taxpayers just where their tax money is actually going. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants who tell the billionaires how insightful they are because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, perhaps the billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our society: Poverty and racial discrimination.
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Don’t exclude Buffett. He gives his “charity” donations to Gates to spend. Check how the minority community, views the lending policies of the Buffett-owned mobile home manufacturing company. Buffett, like Gates, has claimed great largesse, for more than two decades. So, why are they, the 1st and 2nd richest men, on the lists of the wealthy, never falling even one rung on the lists?
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I guess Raj didn’t notice that Gates’ blog post was linked directly in that “disreputable source” that Diane used.
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I don’t know about Seattle but here in Chicago, people are not allowed to raise chickens in their low income apartments…or any apartments for that matter.
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Here in Los Angeles we raise our chickens in shopping carts and tents on the freeways. Sometimes, it can be kind of a hassle, though. Well, you can’t ask for everything.
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Raising chickens is among the better things he has said. They get rid of bugs, too. A lot of problems in Africa come from bugs. In fact, He can be the chicken activist all he wants. Just no more common core or advice to Africans on how to recycle and store their pee.
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Bill Gates – been there, done that. I live and teach in Bridgeport, CT, where most if not all the schools are Title 1. Bridgeport residents actually do raise chickens and I don’t see it getting better.
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It’s not going to get any better until Gates, Buffett et. al. redirect their politicians, toward changing the concentration of wealth, so that it, no longer, has a strangle hold on the world’s economy. In other words, the plight of the 99% will get worse, unless and until, the richest 0.1% are immobilized or gone.
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Colonialism breeds immorality.
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Donating to HI may be a good thing. Subsistence agriculture is better than nothing. However, it does strike me that saying If I were poor, I would raise chickens is a bit like those alternative life-style types who delved into farming (with little capital and less knowledge and perseverance). Once they found out how unromantic it actually is (and how difficult) they dropped out. Being poor is actually hard work. It is why my father, a farmer until he could work in a factory and lease out the farm, always told me to work smart not hard.
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Was it Marie Antoinette who played at being a milk maid? I can almost see Bill heading out to the back yard to greet his girls/flock.
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