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Depends what you want to do. Which of the Y combinator startups is going to help children in developing countries?

• pg 18y ago
  My whole point was that what actually helps children in developing countries most is not heroic rescue missions but boring infrastructure improvements. That is, the stuff that helps children in developing countries most is the stuff that helps everyone, like making power transmission more efficient, or cloth manufacture cheaper. Lots of YC funded startups make the world more efficient in some way. Octopart, for example. They make the electronics industry more efficient, and that helps everyone, just in a quiet, diffuse way.
  • fbailey 18y ago
    Absolutely true, but does it help the children now? It's a bit like antimalarial research, of course it will help millions of people when a vaccination is finally available. But it won't help those children who will be infected next week, free mosquito nets and free drugs might help. Looking only at the longterm economic development perspective you are absolutely right, but if you want to help those suffering right now, you are wrong. Your quote: "And yet if you diff present conditions against conditions 100 or 500 years ago-- even in the poorest places--" What would starving people think about us when we tell them that we are not giving them any food because it's not worth it in the long term?