Solving poverty is a much harder problem than going to Mars. It's not that we don't have the resources - by most estimates everyone in the world could have a co

Solving poverty is a much harder problem than going to Mars. It's not that we don't have the resources - by most estimates everyone in the world could have a comfortable working-class lifestyle if wealth was evenly distributed. The difficulty is political. Nobody, not even the superpowers, has enough power to make changes like that. Even if they did, they would have to trample on the rights of hundreds of millions of people to exercise it, and that would inevitably turn violent. Changes like that have to be slow and according to the will of the people. No amount of money can help. But the governments of individual countries can work towards it in small steps, and most liberal-leaning countries actually are. Relatively uncontroversial socialist policies like progressive taxation, social security, universal healthcare, welfare payouts, and public works projects reduce inequality within countries over time. More controversial policies like free immigration and free (really free, not TPP) trade reduce inequality between countries. Continuing advances in worker productivity and growing support for things like universal basic income mean the situation will only get better with time. On the other hand, going to Mars is just an engineering problem. A whole 10-year campaign of Mars missions could cost less than what the US spends on its meager socialist policies in a single year. Progress down here and progress up there aren't mutually exclusive.