8 ms·

Poverty Kills

36 points by ph0rque 17y ago

TomOfTTB 17y ago
To me, this idea couldn't be more wrong headed. In my experience it is rationality that solves most problems. Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems. Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- kgrin 17y ago
  And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Of course, that's a small-scale, contrived example, but there are plenty of areas in public policy where many or most people's behavior isn't rational. Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards. Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about. Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being). The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Yup, it does. What of it? What makes you think that giving him the fish helps? You can spend all your resources on problems that can't be fixed, and accomplish nothing, or you can spend them on problems that can be fixed and actually accomplish something. It's unclear why you prefer the former.
- rw 17y ago
  "Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality." What if it is just embedded historical rationality? cf. evolutionary psychology.
  - jibiki 17y ago
    In this particular case, the appeal to emotion leads to incorrect conclusions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law
- helveticaman 17y ago
  I think it is rational in the sense that it is counting something. That always leads somewhere.
- aaronsw 17y ago
  How is this emotionalism? I'm writing about people who are trying to take a rationalist, cold-hearted look at death and do something about it.
RobertL 17y ago
Environmentalism is even more deadly. In 1972 the new head of the EPA (William Ruckelshaus) banned DDT against the considered opinion of every scientist he hired to advise him on the matter. Lead scientist was Dr. G. Gordon Edwards. Respected entomologist from the University of California Santa Barbara... DDT ban has resulted in over 80 million unnecessary human fatalities. Mostly children and pregnant women. Why don't we ever talk about that??
TheElder 17y ago
Poverty is the natural state for humans, not the wealthy prosperous state that most Westerners live in. What those in the west created is an aberration. People, like the author of this article wonder, why are people poor? Why is there poverty? The deeper question to ask is, why was wealth ever created? And what do we do to encourage it everywhere?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Poverty is only natural when the local human population exceeds the local resources available to sustain it. For most of human history, poverty was not the natural state of human existence; indeed, given the frequency and scale of wars (prior to the Geneva conventions, when war was between populations and not just armies), poverty was very rare until the 19th century.
  - bokonist 17y ago
    I'm surprised this has so many up votes because it is so factually incorrect. In 1690 Gregory King made an made a primitive economic census of the English population. Out of a population of 5.5 million, 1.3 million were "cottagers and paupers", and 2.7 were in the lowest class "Vagrants; as Gipsies, Theives, Beggers, &c." (source, The World we have lost by Peter Laslett) It's should also be noted that average heights were about 4 inches shorter than the height of a modern American. Not having good enough nutrition to reach a full height seems like a pretty sure sign of poverty to me. They did not so much have the crowded slums that are typical of modern poverty. People would die of disease before cities could reach such densities. But relative to us, people were impoverished in terms of health, nutrition, or material comfort. EDIT: One more point. Overall violent death rates ( including war and homicide) in 16th-19th century Britain were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pages 128-129.
    - run4yourlives 17y ago
bokonist 17y ago
Anti-poverty policy (especially foreign aid) over the past five decades has consisted mainly of giving away food, healthcare, etc. For a while, this decreased death rates substantially in the third world. But the problem was that when the death rates decreased, we simply got more and more poor people. Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again: Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa. Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/writing-what-i-should-have-written-so-many-years-ago-1437779.html http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/wri... ) Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get … rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. … and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050. The difference in fertility rates between the classes is astounding ( source http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php ) -------------------Poorest-5th--|--Middle-5th--|--Top 5th Bangladesh------4.6---------------3.3--------------2.2 Brazil----------------4.8---------------2.1--------------0.7 South Africa--------4.8---------------2.7-------------1.9 Recently I was in Rio de Janeiro. Slums push out for miles and miles. They grow bigger every year. Meanwhile the pretty old 19th century buildings slowly rot away. When poorest 5th have 4 or 5 kids, the result is going to be even more poverty the next generation. No amount of foreign aid can alter this logic, the aid will simply fall into a bottomless well. In theory, aid could go more towards "teaching a man to fish". But the reality is that I cannot think of a single historical example of a group of one nation/culture/ethnicity achieving economic development via the charity of another nation/ethnicity. If someone knows of an example, I'd be interested to hear it. All cases of economic development I know have either a) come from within (Deng in China, the Meiji Restoration, etc) or b) come from colonialism ( examples range from Roman Gaul to Hong Kong to parts of Africa before decolonialism )
yummyfajitas 17y ago
A black man in Harlem is 4.11 times as likely to die in a given year as the average American male. This fact brings to mind an anecdote illustrating the fact that people have no clue about relative risks. While jogging, I passed by a protest near Harlem Hospital. Signs mentioned this death rate disparity. I asked someone what the protest was about, and was told that they wanted more funding for the hospital. Most of the protesters were sitting on lawn chairs, smoking, and eating fast food. Many were obese, few were of healthy weight. They didn't seem to realize that running in circles around the hospital would do far more to reduce the disparity in death rates than any amount of funding.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  I'll see your anecdote and raise you a couple of years of experience. I've worked as an ER nurse for 15 years in over 30 hospitals in 5 states. A lot of that work was contract work in hospitals in poor neighborhoods that had a lot of trouble staffing their departments. I now work in a very, very nice upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon Valley. Absolutly, unequivocally I can say that if you're sick and want the best medical care, go to the hospital in the neighborhood where the rich people live. The difference in care is night and day. Well to do hospitals have patients with private insurance that pay a lot more than Medicare or public health insurance. They also tend to expect more from their medical care, and are usually a lot more educated and can be more proactive in their care. One ER that I worked at in Chicago, I drove past a funeral home. And almost every single shift, there was a group of kids standing on the street corner outside of the funeral home "tipping a forty" for a friend that had just died. I've worked in ER's that were so overcrowded, that when a patient died, we'd have to shove the body into a dirty utility room to make room for patients we could still help. That would * never * fly in a rich hospital. In poor neighborhoods, people are used to dying young. They are used to the crappy care that's given them, and yes, they tend to have a lot more lifestyle diseases. But, why do they have more lifestyle disease? In Silicon Valley, I can go to my local farmers market, and I can afford to spend money on organic produce. When I didn't have a car, and lived on the edge of the ghetto in Chicago, it was really easy to get my calories at McDonald's down the street or get crap food at the 7-11 down the block instead of walking 12 blocks each way to the grocery store. Poverty does kill, for many reasons. Please dont just chalk it up to "they should stop eating crap and get some excercise."
lupin_sansei 17y ago
Poverty doesn't kill. Nature kills you. Wealth just reduces the effect nature has on you (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare etc). We've known about the solution to poverty since the 18th century (free trade - aka capitalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations but the solution isn't popular among intellectuals, despite the correlation of free trade and per capita GDP (admittedly crude but one the more objective measures available). http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/20060123iub.gif http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/20090215144510!GM_-_Countries_by_Economic_Freedom_Index.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/2... http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages/e/ec/economic_freedom_charts.png http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimage... http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05_EconFreedomMAP.jpg http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05... The current state of the third world was caused by the UK and others encouraging places like Africa and India to follow the socialist model in the post collonial era after World War 2. The extent to which former collonies have prospered is the extent to which they ignored that advice (Singapore, India since 1990 etc) http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf
- eru 17y ago
  I agree. Though poverty can kill in at least one more way than not sheltering you from nature, somewhat more directly. Social status is a positional good. I.e. relative affluence counts more than absolute affluence. High status people have better health etc than low status people. This seems to be at least partly a psychologic effect.
lionhearted 17y ago
I believe Aaron has an account here. If so, I'd love for him to read this comment, and anyone who generally supports his ideas to read this comment, because I think it could change lives. I read this piece by him: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall Short summary: A speaker tells a story about an evil king. The king gets 10 hostages, and you, and asks you to decide, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can die in their place. What do you choose?" When asked, most people choose to sacrifice themselves. Same scenario. Evil king, 10 hostages. But now the king asks, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can give me all your money and live in poverty for the rest of your life. Which do you choose?" And the people asked think, and it seems reasonable to choose the poverty alternative. Certainly, it's better than dying, and they already agreed to die to save the people. Then it talks about children dying in Africa, and how with just a little bit of money you could save those people. The speaker concludes, "Thus if you decide to go on with the life you were probably planning to lead, you will be letting 10 people die rather than give up your flat-screen television and your cocktail parties. And that is more than gluttony, it is murder." Now there's a major, major, major flaw with this line of thinking, which is also in "Poverty Kills" and many pieces along those lines. It's the assumption that there are no choices besides the "evil king" and "dying/sacrificing for the rest". Never was this more clear than my travels in the back provinces of China. I climbed Mount Emeishan in China, and the locals farm the mountain and live quite poorly. By selling food and crafts on the side of the road to visitors (mostly Chinese, didn't see any foreigners besides me) - by selling, they got the money they needed to buy tools, medicine, and so on. I got to eat some local food, and bought a wooden sword for my then-kid brother. The sword cost basically nothing except a few hours, and the money from that could buy weeks worth of medicine or seasons worth of clothing, and so on. This money went to the heads of households and most industrious people on Emeishan, who in turn would help their relatives and so forth. The Communist Chinese government couldn't begin to do half the job feeding and providing medicine to these people that free trade did. It was never more clear to me - honestly working for money and spending it on things I wanted helped other people. It helped the people who paid me to for them (I freelance/contract work, I haven't been salaried ever). It helped the people who I bought food and crafts from. Everyone won. So back to the "evil king" - what if instead of giving in for the hostages right now, you came back later, kicked in the door with your sword, and assassinated the evil murderous king? That's the third option. There's more choices than "give up your money in taxes/charity or bad outcomes happen". I almost built an international school in China with my girlfriend. I still might go build schools someday. If I do, they'll run for a profit. The teachers will be paid more than they would at another job (or else they wouldn't come work for us). The parents will value it (or else they wouldn't send their kids there). The administrators of the school will be paid. The kids will learn better, speak more fluent English, and increase trade between China and English speaking countries. That'll bring more money to China, and lower the expenses of all English speaking people abroad who can afford the Chinese goods. If there were more taxes, and I had less of my own money to fund a school, it wouldn't be possible. The Chinese government is not run by people as driven, intelligent, and empathetic as my girlfriend. If they took her money, and the American government took my money, then we couldn't build a school, and instead you'd have schools like Sichuan and the United States currently have. Quality - not so much. Charity has its place. I've run charity events and donate to charities. I tend to support St. Jude's Children Hospital in North America and Great Ormond Street in London. A friend is getting a therapy dog program started in Tokyo, I pledged some money for that and volunteered for the auction. But there's greater options. Really now, governments have proven themselves incompetent many times over. And nonprofits, God bless them, frequently have people drawing way over market salaries and making themselves rich, while working at a job with less pressure, lower expectations, and very little accountability. If you look at the statistics, nonprofits are depressingly ineffective and do very little towards succeeding in their missions and improving the world. There's a third option. It's improving the world honestly, getting compensated for it, and paying people who improve your life in return. That system has built almost everything of value on the planet. I reject the "evil king or your life" dichotomy; it is false; there are other options. Aaron's a hell of a writer, and I hope he reads this. I know political views can be like religions - but I try not to make mine. I've studied all sorts of history and sciences and commerce and all manner of things. The results look like charity/government (and especially taxes) underperform the rather cold and heartless market in any long term time horizon. Now, these aren't fashionable viewpoints in many intellectual circles, but we all ought to consider them - is the end good is our objective, then even unfashionable opinions against our circles' worldviews must be considered. If anyone knows Aaron, would they kindly point him to this comment? He seems like an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful guy, and I really hope there's something I've written in here that's valuable to him.

36 points by ph0rque 17y ago

To me, this idea couldn't be more wrong headed. In my experience it is rationality that solves most problems. Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems. Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
kgrin 17y ago
And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Of course, that's a small-scale, contrived example, but there are plenty of areas in public policy where many or most people's behavior isn't rational. Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards. Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about. Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being). The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.
- anamax 17y ago
  > And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Yup, it does. What of it? What makes you think that giving him the fish helps? You can spend all your resources on problems that can't be fixed, and accomplish nothing, or you can spend them on problems that can be fixed and actually accomplish something. It's unclear why you prefer the former.
rw 17y ago
"Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality." What if it is just embedded historical rationality? cf. evolutionary psychology.
- jibiki 17y ago
  In this particular case, the appeal to emotion leads to incorrect conclusions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law
helveticaman 17y ago
I think it is rational in the sense that it is counting something. That always leads somewhere.
aaronsw 17y ago
How is this emotionalism? I'm writing about people who are trying to take a rationalist, cold-hearted look at death and do something about it.

RobertL 17y ago

Environmentalism is even more deadly. In 1972 the new head of the EPA (William Ruckelshaus) banned DDT against the considered opinion of every scientist he hired to advise him on the matter. Lead scientist was Dr. G. Gordon Edwards. Respected entomologist from the University of California Santa Barbara... DDT ban has resulted in over 80 million unnecessary human fatalities. Mostly children and pregnant women. Why don't we ever talk about that??

TheElder 17y ago

Poverty is the natural state for humans, not the wealthy prosperous state that most Westerners live in. What those in the west created is an aberration. People, like the author of this article wonder, why are people poor? Why is there poverty? The deeper question to ask is, why was wealth ever created? And what do we do to encourage it everywhere?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
fatdog789 17y ago
Poverty is only natural when the local human population exceeds the local resources available to sustain it. For most of human history, poverty was not the natural state of human existence; indeed, given the frequency and scale of wars (prior to the Geneva conventions, when war was between populations and not just armies), poverty was very rare until the 19th century.
- bokonist 17y ago
  I'm surprised this has so many up votes because it is so factually incorrect. In 1690 Gregory King made an made a primitive economic census of the English population. Out of a population of 5.5 million, 1.3 million were "cottagers and paupers", and 2.7 were in the lowest class "Vagrants; as Gipsies, Theives, Beggers, &c." (source, The World we have lost by Peter Laslett) It's should also be noted that average heights were about 4 inches shorter than the height of a modern American. Not having good enough nutrition to reach a full height seems like a pretty sure sign of poverty to me. They did not so much have the crowded slums that are typical of modern poverty. People would die of disease before cities could reach such densities. But relative to us, people were impoverished in terms of health, nutrition, or material comfort. EDIT: One more point. Overall violent death rates ( including war and homicide) in 16th-19th century Britain were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pages 128-129.
  - run4yourlives 17y ago

bokonist 17y ago

Anti-poverty policy (especially foreign aid) over the past five decades has consisted mainly of giving away food, healthcare, etc. For a while, this decreased death rates substantially in the third world. But the problem was that when the death rates decreased, we simply got more and more poor people. Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again: Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa. Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/writing-what-i-should-have-written-so-many-years-ago-1437779.html http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/wri... ) Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get … rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. … and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050. The difference in fertility rates between the classes is astounding ( source http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php ) -------------------Poorest-5th--|--Middle-5th--|--Top 5th Bangladesh------4.6---------------3.3--------------2.2 Brazil----------------4.8---------------2.1--------------0.7 South Africa--------4.8---------------2.7-------------1.9 Recently I was in Rio de Janeiro. Slums push out for miles and miles. They grow bigger every year. Meanwhile the pretty old 19th century buildings slowly rot away. When poorest 5th have 4 or 5 kids, the result is going to be even more poverty the next generation. No amount of foreign aid can alter this logic, the aid will simply fall into a bottomless well. In theory, aid could go more towards "teaching a man to fish". But the reality is that I cannot think of a single historical example of a group of one nation/culture/ethnicity achieving economic development via the charity of another nation/ethnicity. If someone knows of an example, I'd be interested to hear it. All cases of economic development I know have either a) come from within (Deng in China, the Meiji Restoration, etc) or b) come from colonialism ( examples range from Roman Gaul to Hong Kong to parts of Africa before decolonialism )

yummyfajitas 17y ago

A black man in Harlem is 4.11 times as likely to die in a given year as the average American male. This fact brings to mind an anecdote illustrating the fact that people have no clue about relative risks. While jogging, I passed by a protest near Harlem Hospital. Signs mentioned this death rate disparity. I asked someone what the protest was about, and was told that they wanted more funding for the hospital. Most of the protesters were sitting on lawn chairs, smoking, and eating fast food. Many were obese, few were of healthy weight. They didn't seem to realize that running in circles around the hospital would do far more to reduce the disparity in death rates than any amount of funding.

iamelgringo 17y ago
I'll see your anecdote and raise you a couple of years of experience. I've worked as an ER nurse for 15 years in over 30 hospitals in 5 states. A lot of that work was contract work in hospitals in poor neighborhoods that had a lot of trouble staffing their departments. I now work in a very, very nice upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon Valley. Absolutly, unequivocally I can say that if you're sick and want the best medical care, go to the hospital in the neighborhood where the rich people live. The difference in care is night and day. Well to do hospitals have patients with private insurance that pay a lot more than Medicare or public health insurance. They also tend to expect more from their medical care, and are usually a lot more educated and can be more proactive in their care. One ER that I worked at in Chicago, I drove past a funeral home. And almost every single shift, there was a group of kids standing on the street corner outside of the funeral home "tipping a forty" for a friend that had just died. I've worked in ER's that were so overcrowded, that when a patient died, we'd have to shove the body into a dirty utility room to make room for patients we could still help. That would * never * fly in a rich hospital. In poor neighborhoods, people are used to dying young. They are used to the crappy care that's given them, and yes, they tend to have a lot more lifestyle diseases. But, why do they have more lifestyle disease? In Silicon Valley, I can go to my local farmers market, and I can afford to spend money on organic produce. When I didn't have a car, and lived on the edge of the ghetto in Chicago, it was really easy to get my calories at McDonald's down the street or get crap food at the 7-11 down the block instead of walking 12 blocks each way to the grocery store. Poverty does kill, for many reasons. Please dont just chalk it up to "they should stop eating crap and get some excercise."

lupin_sansei 17y ago

Poverty doesn't kill. Nature kills you. Wealth just reduces the effect nature has on you (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare etc). We've known about the solution to poverty since the 18th century (free trade - aka capitalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations but the solution isn't popular among intellectuals, despite the correlation of free trade and per capita GDP (admittedly crude but one the more objective measures available). http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/20060123iub.gif http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/20090215144510!GM_-_Countries_by_Economic_Freedom_Index.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/2... http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages/e/ec/economic_freedom_charts.png http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimage... http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05_EconFreedomMAP.jpg http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05... The current state of the third world was caused by the UK and others encouraging places like Africa and India to follow the socialist model in the post collonial era after World War 2. The extent to which former collonies have prospered is the extent to which they ignored that advice (Singapore, India since 1990 etc) http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

eru 17y ago
I agree. Though poverty can kill in at least one more way than not sheltering you from nature, somewhat more directly. Social status is a positional good. I.e. relative affluence counts more than absolute affluence. High status people have better health etc than low status people. This seems to be at least partly a psychologic effect.

lionhearted 17y ago

I believe Aaron has an account here. If so, I'd love for him to read this comment, and anyone who generally supports his ideas to read this comment, because I think it could change lives. I read this piece by him: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall Short summary: A speaker tells a story about an evil king. The king gets 10 hostages, and you, and asks you to decide, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can die in their place. What do you choose?" When asked, most people choose to sacrifice themselves. Same scenario. Evil king, 10 hostages. But now the king asks, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can give me all your money and live in poverty for the rest of your life. Which do you choose?" And the people asked think, and it seems reasonable to choose the poverty alternative. Certainly, it's better than dying, and they already agreed to die to save the people. Then it talks about children dying in Africa, and how with just a little bit of money you could save those people. The speaker concludes, "Thus if you decide to go on with the life you were probably planning to lead, you will be letting 10 people die rather than give up your flat-screen television and your cocktail parties. And that is more than gluttony, it is murder." Now there's a major, major, major flaw with this line of thinking, which is also in "Poverty Kills" and many pieces along those lines. It's the assumption that there are no choices besides the "evil king" and "dying/sacrificing for the rest". Never was this more clear than my travels in the back provinces of China. I climbed Mount Emeishan in China, and the locals farm the mountain and live quite poorly. By selling food and crafts on the side of the road to visitors (mostly Chinese, didn't see any foreigners besides me) - by selling, they got the money they needed to buy tools, medicine, and so on. I got to eat some local food, and bought a wooden sword for my then-kid brother. The sword cost basically nothing except a few hours, and the money from that could buy weeks worth of medicine or seasons worth of clothing, and so on. This money went to the heads of households and most industrious people on Emeishan, who in turn would help their relatives and so forth. The Communist Chinese government couldn't begin to do half the job feeding and providing medicine to these people that free trade did. It was never more clear to me - honestly working for money and spending it on things I wanted helped other people. It helped the people who paid me to for them (I freelance/contract work, I haven't been salaried ever). It helped the people who I bought food and crafts from. Everyone won. So back to the "evil king" - what if instead of giving in for the hostages right now, you came back later, kicked in the door with your sword, and assassinated the evil murderous king? That's the third option. There's more choices than "give up your money in taxes/charity or bad outcomes happen". I almost built an international school in China with my girlfriend. I still might go build schools someday. If I do, they'll run for a profit. The teachers will be paid more than they would at another job (or else they wouldn't come work for us). The parents will value it (or else they wouldn't send their kids there). The administrators of the school will be paid. The kids will learn better, speak more fluent English, and increase trade between China and English speaking countries. That'll bring more money to China, and lower the expenses of all English speaking people abroad who can afford the Chinese goods. If there were more taxes, and I had less of my own money to fund a school, it wouldn't be possible. The Chinese government is not run by people as driven, intelligent, and empathetic as my girlfriend. If they took her money, and the American government took my money, then we couldn't build a school, and instead you'd have schools like Sichuan and the United States currently have. Quality - not so much. Charity has its place. I've run charity events and donate to charities. I tend to support St. Jude's Children Hospital in North America and Great Ormond Street in London. A friend is getting a therapy dog program started in Tokyo, I pledged some money for that and volunteered for the auction. But there's greater options. Really now, governments have proven themselves incompetent many times over. And nonprofits, God bless them, frequently have people drawing way over market salaries and making themselves rich, while working at a job with less pressure, lower expectations, and very little accountability. If you look at the statistics, nonprofits are depressingly ineffective and do very little towards succeeding in their missions and improving the world. There's a third option. It's improving the world honestly, getting compensated for it, and paying people who improve your life in return. That system has built almost everything of value on the planet. I reject the "evil king or your life" dichotomy; it is false; there are other options. Aaron's a hell of a writer, and I hope he reads this. I know political views can be like religions - but I try not to make mine. I've studied all sorts of history and sciences and commerce and all manner of things. The results look like charity/government (and especially taxes) underperform the rather cold and heartless market in any long term time horizon. Now, these aren't fashionable viewpoints in many intellectual circles, but we all ought to consider them - is the end good is our objective, then even unfashionable opinions against our circles' worldviews must be considered. If anyone knows Aaron, would they kindly point him to this comment? He seems like an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful guy, and I really hope there's something I've written in here that's valuable to him.