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Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to ev

Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT that helps people among the U.S.’s 43 million recipients of the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) service to stretch their food-stamp benefits as far as possible. I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible.

john_moscow 9y ago
>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. Because there is a huge and complex domain of human motivation, appreciation for hard-earned things vs. taking them for granted and so on. USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Mostly because people lost motivation for achievement and started blatantly faking numbers and statistics since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. As someone who survived that crash, I would really hope that SV can learn from others' mistakes rather than repeating them.
- lsc 9y ago
  eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely about seeing to it that people don't starve. We're rich enough, in America, at least, that with tax increases, we could provide the minimum for everyone, and pay for it out of the sorts of taxes we pay now (only, of couse, somewhat more) There was a lot of effort in that direction here and in the UK in the '70s; there was a lot of criticism that the public housing, for instance, wasn't very nice, but what really ended it was the rise of the political movement that backed Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US)
  - eartheaterrr 9y ago
    I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population. One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?
    - tonmoy 9y ago
      Your logic assumes that most people are so shallow that they would stop working/trying to improve their conditions after they are able to live “comfortably”. There are several wealthy countries that provide this kind of welfare without much population growth or lazy workforce. On the other hand there are counties like Bangladesh that saw rapid growth in population in the 80s even though most people were very very poor - in fact the country’s pouplation growth has demolished now that more people can live comfortably due to increased wealth and access to education.
    - Frondo 9y ago
      The leap you're making, that I don't understand, is that if people didn't have to work, they'd start having huge families en masse. Why do you think that would happen? Is there any basis for having that concern?
      - godzillabrennus 9y ago
        Sex is fun, it’s free, and procreation is a biologically driven part of being human. The argument is that if we give people a basic sustainable way to live and the least motivated to improve their condition will likely fall back to the basics.
        yorwba 9y ago
        Children are annoying, though. I doubt most people would start having huge families if they can easily prevent it while still having sex.
- Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago
  An additional problem is one of economic calculation. Mises argued one hundred years ago that a planned economy where the state owns the means of production and arbitrarily sets prices without an open market to determine prices by supply and demand would result in economic waste and shortages. He was largely proven right by the disastrous Soviet experience. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/ludwig-von-mises-economic-calculation-under-socialism-part-1 https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    In a capitalist system, a zero sum game in which titans buy ads to pull marketshare back and forth between each other creates value, yet feeding a starving person does not. That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences. It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.
  - fuck_google 9y ago
    There were however plans to move from 5 year plans to realtime planning with the help of computers, which would have probably worked a bit better as the planning could have been automated, made better use of optimization and react to changes much faster.
  - TFYS 9y ago
    While he might have been right one hundred years ago, the economic calculation problem might not be a problem anymore. We're starting to get to the point where we have enough computing power to simulate the world economy. Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow.
    - 9y ago
- gumby 9y ago
  > USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that the former (imperial) regime seemed uninterested in making. Even into the 1950s and even 1960s quite a lot of people, including a surprisingly large amount of US government officials, thought that there was a chance the USSR could surpass the USA. I think such people were delusional, since the signs were pretty clear at the time (I was a child at that time, but I did study the USSR in the 1980s when it was very obviously not a threat to the west). Don't get me wrong: the USSR was founded by a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky et al) and, for various reasons developed into a, yes, evil system. I don't blame it entirely on the people involved -- I think anyone who tries to follow that model, even with good intensions (and it's not clear the Bolsheviks had good intentions) is going to end up with a shitty result. But dispassionately one thing they did accomplish was the thing you said they failed miserably at. And it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off.
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  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 700 56 103 France 19 758 23 500 27 401 36 262 39 284 They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either. They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.
- praulv 9y ago
  And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.
- amelius 9y ago
  > people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.
lsc 9y ago
Fundamentally, I do think that focusing on the technology end of the problem, making solving the problem cheaper, is a totally valid way to try to help, especially if you are better at technology than politics. But I toatally agree that for-profit companies have incentives that can become problematic when their customer base doesn't have anywhere else to turn.
Alex3917 9y ago
> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money" You need to read the article more carefully, it says "But FreshEBT isn't a typical Silicon Valley product."
hyperion2010 9y ago
I would say that in principle we don't do it because at some level we probably do actually believe in the doctrine of self determination at the level of states. This is directly at odds with the notion that rich countries should be trying to provide infrastructure and food for the worlds poorest. Of course this argument doesn't hold up within a single country, so the question of why entrenched poverty remains an issue throughout the United States is indeed a political one where there is no excuse.
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  Why should rich countries be trying to provide infrastructure and food for the world's poorest? Far as I know, the original reason for doing so was to create strong and loyal trading partners. That doesn't seem to have happened though. Is that no longer the end goal?
  - demxzy 9y ago
    It hasn't happened probably because most of the aid to us in developing countries go to treating the symptoms of our real problems. Also aid business is a huge business for Western NGOs and most of the money find their way back to the west anyway. The positive I can see is that aid buys a lot of influence in a much cheaper way than war.
  - hyperion2010 9y ago
    At the state level it is still true in some cases. China is dumping loads of less-strings-attached (than the international development fund) cash into the developing world, and one argument is that they are developing new markets for their goods. A more sinister twist would be that they are laying the infrastructure for future all-Chinese enclaves in those countries. On the other hand the US's failed state building exercises in the middle east is an example of the complete opposite. The US was/is literally burning money in an attempt to 'improve' another country. None of the nonsense about 'went for the oil' makes any sense when you look at the total cost, the destruction of a potential trading partner, etc. It is the 'oh no he is killing his own people/keeping his own people in poverty/pillaging his country for personal gain' type of mentality that enables the kind of self determination rejecting behavior that the US has been engaged in for a very long time. There are things that we can and should do to prevent atrocity, but we have consistently failed to strike a balance with helping states develop and have instead repeatedly opted to overthrow governments and destabilize regions, often in the name of improving the lives of their citizens. (Just look at the humanitarian disaster that has been the Arab Spring.)
landryraccoon 9y ago
What's your plan for dealing with Orthodox Judaism or Quiverful or other ideological/religious sects that believe that having as many children possible as quickly as possible is God's will? Exponentially increasing cost is a problem for the most technocratic plans you can imagine. And in a democratic society not only will groups that have tons of children grow rapidly, they will also increase their share of the voting power at the same rate.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  What's the problem? As long as those kids grow up to be roughly as successful as the national average, they'll be paying back into the system and everything works as intended. Also, Orthodox Jews have been around for a long, long time and are still a small minority almost everywhere. Small ideological sects with large families historically don't seem to take over the world.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    >Small ideological sects with large families historically don't seem to take over the world. It only seems that way because pre-1960, the world was entirely dominated by sects (e.g. religions) with large families. All the old religions are very traditionally pro-natalist for a reason. Go forth and multiply! If the population didn't grow, it was only because there was just no more food to feed more mouths. So it was for all of human history until recently. It's only now that there is a significant group of people who choose not to have large families, and who have the birth control technology to make it happen. As with past sects who followed this path, they will dwindle as a proportion of the population. We are in nothing like a steady state, and high-fertility groups absolutely will own the future, just as they owned the past. Topical here is The Most Important Graph In The World: https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Population-1950-2100-b.png https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Populati...
    - abledon 9y ago
      https://mobile.twitter.com/larrykim/status/949279742313795584/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/larrykim/status/94927974231379558...
anovikov 9y ago
Why do we do it? We need poor as an example to keep working and middle class motivated.
zappo2938 9y ago
Governments shouldn't take care of people. People should take care of people. (Over course, we should take care of ourselves first but that doesn't always work out.)
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  People taking care of people on an individual basis doesn't scale up very well.
- splitrocket 9y ago
  Strange, is the government somehow not made up of people? This line of reasoning is so strange, like government is some sort of alien being, not an institution of the people, for the people. Taxes are how you buy civilization. Voting is how you decide what sort of civilization you want.
  - chronic193 9y ago
    And what happens when the people minimize paying taxes and stop voting? See: the US.
  - zappo2938 9y ago
    I read "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau[0] in my early twenties and have been miserable ever since. "I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least' ... But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." [0] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/thoreau/civil.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/thoreau/civil.html
stale2002 9y ago
Well it turns out that this political problem is extremely hard to solve. Because of that, other people are working on technological problems. The cheaper it is to feed people, from a technological standpoint, the easier it is to solve the political problem.
cosmie 9y ago
> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible. There’s already an enormous number of fees. Check out midway through [1] where it lists out the various fees JP Morgan got in their 2014 EBT management contract with New York State (it was the first example I came across, there may be a newer contract publicly available). The federal portion alone (there’s a state-level component as well) of the cost to administer EBT services in 2017 were $4.2 billion [2], so there’s plenty of fees between recipients and food stamp money already. That said, iirc it’s illegal for a third party to insert a fee related to EBT services. In fact, most of the fees that are charged aren’t directly visible to the recipient, but are rather charged on the backend as part of the administration costs. Looking at the screenshots for the FreshEBT app, there’s a coupon section and the ability to find stores that accept SNAP benefits. It’s more likely that they’ll monetize via retailers and manufacturer promotions rather than via recipients themselves. Plus the marketing analytics components of being able to track EBT spending habits and tie it into all the other type of data you can collect by having an app installed on people’s phones. Not that there isn’t potential qualms about that monetization strategy, but that type of data is already available to the largest retailers and isn’t a new level of monitoring. And it shows the company’s incentive isn’t actively detrimental or predatory to the users like inserting fees, as you suggested. [1] http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-stamps http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-s... [2] https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsu...
mpweiher 9y ago
> Why don't we do it? Define "we". World-wide, "we" are doing an absolutely amazing job of eliminating poverty. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Since-1820.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-... https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty Also, most industrialized economies don't really have absolute poverty: anyone who is poor has the right to social benefits to alleviate it, to provide the basics of food, clothing and housing (as well as other basics such as education). So for example, in Germany, we talk about poverty being on the increase. But that is relative poverty, meaning a certain percentage of the average. So we can "increase" poverty by simply improving GDP w/o raising the bottom as much as the increase in GDP.
agumonkey 9y ago
will and education, you can teach people how to make electricity, how to make solar concentrator, how to isolate from cold, etc basically how to unplug yourself from the economy to restore foundations to survive better when you're on the border of the system
txsh 9y ago
> We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. That's like saying nobody should ever be without water because of rain. There's more wealth than what's needed to provide necessities but it isn't located everywhere its needed and getting it there is often virtually impossible.
tim333 9y ago
Relative poverty is a social and political problem but reductions in absolute poverty such as having enough to eat have been to a large extent driven by science and technology.
stult 9y ago
I have several objections to your argument, many of which others have covered, including the actual lack of user fees. But even at the most basic level your argument doesn't make any sense. Technology enables more efficient service delivery, which means we can do more with the same budget. Budgets are constrained by politics, which as you say is probably morally wrong and an inadequate response. Yet we can change the technology more easily than the politics. Or, at least the people who choose to contribute with technology can do so more easily than they can completely transform the US political discourse. Plus, even if the politics change, more efficient services will continue to benefit society by reducing the total costs. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
subcosmos 9y ago
Having worked in nonprofits for years, I have truly learned the hard lesson about how hard it is to raise funds for altruistic endeavors! It's so much easier to raise funds from someone who expects a return to their life in one form or another. We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged." I think it's a little more complex than that. Something that still doesn't seem to be well understood in the non-profit field is that of dependency. The idea "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" should be the guiding principal of pretty much all non-profits (with the only exception, in my opinion, being for disaster relief). The idea being that the end goal is self-sufficiency. I'm not a millionaire, nor am I likely to become one in my lifetime, but I recognise my own patterns of donating to charity, and I can see the charity/non-profits that I'm most likely to donate to are either involved with disaster relief, or are doing something that makes a lasting change. When I've donated to charities outside these groups, I've resented the expected "thank you for your donation, can you donate any more please". At that point, the charity has become, in a small way, dependent on my generosity, with no end in sight. I'd imagine there's similar resentment for millionaires and billionaires also.

john_moscow 9y ago

>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. Because there is a huge and complex domain of human motivation, appreciation for hard-earned things vs. taking them for granted and so on. USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Mostly because people lost motivation for achievement and started blatantly faking numbers and statistics since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. As someone who survived that crash, I would really hope that SV can learn from others' mistakes rather than repeating them.

lsc 9y ago
eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely about seeing to it that people don't starve. We're rich enough, in America, at least, that with tax increases, we could provide the minimum for everyone, and pay for it out of the sorts of taxes we pay now (only, of couse, somewhat more) There was a lot of effort in that direction here and in the UK in the '70s; there was a lot of criticism that the public housing, for instance, wasn't very nice, but what really ended it was the rise of the political movement that backed Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US)
- eartheaterrr 9y ago
  I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population. One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?
  - tonmoy 9y ago
    Your logic assumes that most people are so shallow that they would stop working/trying to improve their conditions after they are able to live “comfortably”. There are several wealthy countries that provide this kind of welfare without much population growth or lazy workforce. On the other hand there are counties like Bangladesh that saw rapid growth in population in the 80s even though most people were very very poor - in fact the country’s pouplation growth has demolished now that more people can live comfortably due to increased wealth and access to education.
  - Frondo 9y ago
    The leap you're making, that I don't understand, is that if people didn't have to work, they'd start having huge families en masse. Why do you think that would happen? Is there any basis for having that concern?
    - godzillabrennus 9y ago
      Sex is fun, it’s free, and procreation is a biologically driven part of being human. The argument is that if we give people a basic sustainable way to live and the least motivated to improve their condition will likely fall back to the basics.
      - yorwba 9y ago
        Children are annoying, though. I doubt most people would start having huge families if they can easily prevent it while still having sex.
Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago
An additional problem is one of economic calculation. Mises argued one hundred years ago that a planned economy where the state owns the means of production and arbitrarily sets prices without an open market to determine prices by supply and demand would result in economic waste and shortages. He was largely proven right by the disastrous Soviet experience. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/ludwig-von-mises-economic-calculation-under-socialism-part-1 https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  In a capitalist system, a zero sum game in which titans buy ads to pull marketshare back and forth between each other creates value, yet feeding a starving person does not. That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences. It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.
- fuck_google 9y ago
  There were however plans to move from 5 year plans to realtime planning with the help of computers, which would have probably worked a bit better as the planning could have been automated, made better use of optimization and react to changes much faster.
- TFYS 9y ago
  While he might have been right one hundred years ago, the economic calculation problem might not be a problem anymore. We're starting to get to the point where we have enough computing power to simulate the world economy. Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow.
  - 9y ago
gumby 9y ago
> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that the former (imperial) regime seemed uninterested in making. Even into the 1950s and even 1960s quite a lot of people, including a surprisingly large amount of US government officials, thought that there was a chance the USSR could surpass the USA. I think such people were delusional, since the signs were pretty clear at the time (I was a child at that time, but I did study the USSR in the 1980s when it was very obviously not a threat to the west). Don't get me wrong: the USSR was founded by a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky et al) and, for various reasons developed into a, yes, evil system. I don't blame it entirely on the people involved -- I think anyone who tries to follow that model, even with good intensions (and it's not clear the Bolsheviks had good intentions) is going to end up with a shitty result. But dispassionately one thing they did accomplish was the thing you said they failed miserably at. And it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off.
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- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 700 56 103 France 19 758 23 500 27 401 36 262 39 284 They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either. They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.
praulv 9y ago
And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.
amelius 9y ago
> people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.

lsc 9y ago

Fundamentally, I do think that focusing on the technology end of the problem, making solving the problem cheaper, is a totally valid way to try to help, especially if you are better at technology than politics. But I toatally agree that for-profit companies have incentives that can become problematic when their customer base doesn't have anywhere else to turn.

Alex3917 9y ago

> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money" You need to read the article more carefully, it says "But FreshEBT isn't a typical Silicon Valley product."

hyperion2010 9y ago

I would say that in principle we don't do it because at some level we probably do actually believe in the doctrine of self determination at the level of states. This is directly at odds with the notion that rich countries should be trying to provide infrastructure and food for the worlds poorest. Of course this argument doesn't hold up within a single country, so the question of why entrenched poverty remains an issue throughout the United States is indeed a political one where there is no excuse.

RyanZAG 9y ago
Why should rich countries be trying to provide infrastructure and food for the world's poorest? Far as I know, the original reason for doing so was to create strong and loyal trading partners. That doesn't seem to have happened though. Is that no longer the end goal?
- demxzy 9y ago
  It hasn't happened probably because most of the aid to us in developing countries go to treating the symptoms of our real problems. Also aid business is a huge business for Western NGOs and most of the money find their way back to the west anyway. The positive I can see is that aid buys a lot of influence in a much cheaper way than war.
- hyperion2010 9y ago
  At the state level it is still true in some cases. China is dumping loads of less-strings-attached (than the international development fund) cash into the developing world, and one argument is that they are developing new markets for their goods. A more sinister twist would be that they are laying the infrastructure for future all-Chinese enclaves in those countries. On the other hand the US's failed state building exercises in the middle east is an example of the complete opposite. The US was/is literally burning money in an attempt to 'improve' another country. None of the nonsense about 'went for the oil' makes any sense when you look at the total cost, the destruction of a potential trading partner, etc. It is the 'oh no he is killing his own people/keeping his own people in poverty/pillaging his country for personal gain' type of mentality that enables the kind of self determination rejecting behavior that the US has been engaged in for a very long time. There are things that we can and should do to prevent atrocity, but we have consistently failed to strike a balance with helping states develop and have instead repeatedly opted to overthrow governments and destabilize regions, often in the name of improving the lives of their citizens. (Just look at the humanitarian disaster that has been the Arab Spring.)

landryraccoon 9y ago

What's your plan for dealing with Orthodox Judaism or Quiverful or other ideological/religious sects that believe that having as many children possible as quickly as possible is God's will? Exponentially increasing cost is a problem for the most technocratic plans you can imagine. And in a democratic society not only will groups that have tons of children grow rapidly, they will also increase their share of the voting power at the same rate.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
What's the problem? As long as those kids grow up to be roughly as successful as the national average, they'll be paying back into the system and everything works as intended. Also, Orthodox Jews have been around for a long, long time and are still a small minority almost everywhere. Small ideological sects with large families historically don't seem to take over the world.
- Banthum 9y ago
  >Small ideological sects with large families historically don't seem to take over the world. It only seems that way because pre-1960, the world was entirely dominated by sects (e.g. religions) with large families. All the old religions are very traditionally pro-natalist for a reason. Go forth and multiply! If the population didn't grow, it was only because there was just no more food to feed more mouths. So it was for all of human history until recently. It's only now that there is a significant group of people who choose not to have large families, and who have the birth control technology to make it happen. As with past sects who followed this path, they will dwindle as a proportion of the population. We are in nothing like a steady state, and high-fertility groups absolutely will own the future, just as they owned the past. Topical here is The Most Important Graph In The World: https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Population-1950-2100-b.png https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Populati...
  - abledon 9y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/larrykim/status/949279742313795584/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/larrykim/status/94927974231379558...

anovikov 9y ago

Why do we do it? We need poor as an example to keep working and middle class motivated.

zappo2938 9y ago

Governments shouldn't take care of people. People should take care of people. (Over course, we should take care of ourselves first but that doesn't always work out.)

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
People taking care of people on an individual basis doesn't scale up very well.
splitrocket 9y ago
Strange, is the government somehow not made up of people? This line of reasoning is so strange, like government is some sort of alien being, not an institution of the people, for the people. Taxes are how you buy civilization. Voting is how you decide what sort of civilization you want.
- chronic193 9y ago
  And what happens when the people minimize paying taxes and stop voting? See: the US.
- zappo2938 9y ago
  I read "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau[0] in my early twenties and have been miserable ever since. "I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least' ... But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." [0] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/thoreau/civil.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/thoreau/civil.html

stale2002 9y ago

Well it turns out that this political problem is extremely hard to solve. Because of that, other people are working on technological problems. The cheaper it is to feed people, from a technological standpoint, the easier it is to solve the political problem.

cosmie 9y ago

> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible. There’s already an enormous number of fees. Check out midway through [1] where it lists out the various fees JP Morgan got in their 2014 EBT management contract with New York State (it was the first example I came across, there may be a newer contract publicly available). The federal portion alone (there’s a state-level component as well) of the cost to administer EBT services in 2017 were $4.2 billion [2], so there’s plenty of fees between recipients and food stamp money already. That said, iirc it’s illegal for a third party to insert a fee related to EBT services. In fact, most of the fees that are charged aren’t directly visible to the recipient, but are rather charged on the backend as part of the administration costs. Looking at the screenshots for the FreshEBT app, there’s a coupon section and the ability to find stores that accept SNAP benefits. It’s more likely that they’ll monetize via retailers and manufacturer promotions rather than via recipients themselves. Plus the marketing analytics components of being able to track EBT spending habits and tie it into all the other type of data you can collect by having an app installed on people’s phones. Not that there isn’t potential qualms about that monetization strategy, but that type of data is already available to the largest retailers and isn’t a new level of monitoring. And it shows the company’s incentive isn’t actively detrimental or predatory to the users like inserting fees, as you suggested. [1] http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-stamps http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-s... [2] https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsu...

mpweiher 9y ago

> Why don't we do it? Define "we". World-wide, "we" are doing an absolutely amazing job of eliminating poverty. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Since-1820.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-... https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty Also, most industrialized economies don't really have absolute poverty: anyone who is poor has the right to social benefits to alleviate it, to provide the basics of food, clothing and housing (as well as other basics such as education). So for example, in Germany, we talk about poverty being on the increase. But that is relative poverty, meaning a certain percentage of the average. So we can "increase" poverty by simply improving GDP w/o raising the bottom as much as the increase in GDP.

agumonkey 9y ago

will and education, you can teach people how to make electricity, how to make solar concentrator, how to isolate from cold, etc basically how to unplug yourself from the economy to restore foundations to survive better when you're on the border of the system

txsh 9y ago

> We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. That's like saying nobody should ever be without water because of rain. There's more wealth than what's needed to provide necessities but it isn't located everywhere its needed and getting it there is often virtually impossible.

tim333 9y ago

Relative poverty is a social and political problem but reductions in absolute poverty such as having enough to eat have been to a large extent driven by science and technology.

stult 9y ago

I have several objections to your argument, many of which others have covered, including the actual lack of user fees. But even at the most basic level your argument doesn't make any sense. Technology enables more efficient service delivery, which means we can do more with the same budget. Budgets are constrained by politics, which as you say is probably morally wrong and an inadequate response. Yet we can change the technology more easily than the politics. Or, at least the people who choose to contribute with technology can do so more easily than they can completely transform the US political discourse. Plus, even if the politics change, more efficient services will continue to benefit society by reducing the total costs. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

subcosmos 9y ago

Having worked in nonprofits for years, I have truly learned the hard lesson about how hard it is to raise funds for altruistic endeavors! It's so much easier to raise funds from someone who expects a return to their life in one form or another. We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged." I think it's a little more complex than that. Something that still doesn't seem to be well understood in the non-profit field is that of dependency. The idea "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" should be the guiding principal of pretty much all non-profits (with the only exception, in my opinion, being for disaster relief). The idea being that the end goal is self-sufficiency. I'm not a millionaire, nor am I likely to become one in my lifetime, but I recognise my own patterns of donating to charity, and I can see the charity/non-profits that I'm most likely to donate to are either involved with disaster relief, or are doing something that makes a lasting change. When I've donated to charities outside these groups, I've resented the expected "thank you for your donation, can you donate any more please". At that point, the charity has become, in a small way, dependent on my generosity, with no end in sight. I'd imagine there's similar resentment for millionaires and billionaires also.