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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

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 )

derefr 17y ago
Bothers me to say it, but "trade based" eugenics might fix this—it might be possible to genetically engineer the crops we send as aid, so that they decrease fertility when consumed over a lifetime. It wouldn't have to be complete sterility, just just enough to bring the rate of successful procreation down to a 2.0 on average. The hard part (that is, the part that I can't think of an ethical means of studying) would be making sure that the infertility/impotence occurs only at the point of conception, and doesn't affect growing foetuses or developing children or hormone production in adults. EDIT: To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? When changing the social structure is impossible (without destroying the culture that informs it), you have to resort to a technical solution, no matter how distasteful it may be to imagine. The cultures affected most by overpopulation won't use condoms and birth control, won't listen to those that proselytize them, and won't let those that would listen anywhere near the educators. Just making a trade agreement such as "you may only have two children if you take this aid crop" won't work, because once they have the food, they'll go ahead and have the kids anyway (or more likely, just won't know how to not have the kids, whether you require it or not.) An agreement of "you must allow sexual health educators to talk to your people in exchange for the aid" might be closer, but again, nothing's making them take the advice to heart. What's so important about fertility that makes it override concerns about people's actual happiness over their lifetime? We're not talking about killing living people (or even living cells), we're talking about making sperm not attach to eggs. And I apologize that this has turned into a definitively-non-HN comment; it was originally—humans can be "hacked" just as well as anything else, you know—but it seems people use the arrows to express their ethical opinion, which is something I've never seen before, so I decided to defend my own ethical stance, rather than just being objective and technical like most positively-seen discussions here are.
- anamax 17y ago
  > To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? The suggestion is actually quite progressive, in the political sense, which should lead to upvotes.
- cwan 17y ago
  This is a horrifying suggestion. An individual donor at an aid agency meeting said something similar where a cost effective healthcare alternative was being developed in sub-Saharan Africa. His question was "what if you're successful? won't having more people damage the environment?" The rest of us in the room were stunned - this man explicitly valued the environment over human life. You make a similar mistake in attempting to smite a symptom. Poverty is never caused by the lack of resources - or the related overblown fears of overpopulation (look up why oil is often called the Devil's excrement where it's discovered particularly in the developing world). It's bad governments - prior and/or current. High birth rates drop dramatically after a society industrializes. What makes the suggestion repulsive (as much as it is unequivocally absurd) is that instead trying to alleviate suffering and addressing the root causes of absolute poverty, you're effectively starving and forcing deeply impoverished people who are in no position to deny food to accept sterilization. If you're reading HN, you've already hit a genetic jackpot having the opportunities that most of the world will never have. Not only would this be a slippery slope (if you accept forced sterilizations for the "greater good", why not deny needed medical drugs and treatments or worse?), it's an unnecessary slope. So instead of trying to provide the poor with economic opportunities you'd provide them with sterility?

derefr 17y ago

Bothers me to say it, but "trade based" eugenics might fix this—it might be possible to genetically engineer the crops we send as aid, so that they decrease fertility when consumed over a lifetime. It wouldn't have to be complete sterility, just just enough to bring the rate of successful procreation down to a 2.0 on average. The hard part (that is, the part that I can't think of an ethical means of studying) would be making sure that the infertility/impotence occurs only at the point of conception, and doesn't affect growing foetuses or developing children or hormone production in adults. EDIT: To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? When changing the social structure is impossible (without destroying the culture that informs it), you have to resort to a technical solution, no matter how distasteful it may be to imagine. The cultures affected most by overpopulation won't use condoms and birth control, won't listen to those that proselytize them, and won't let those that would listen anywhere near the educators. Just making a trade agreement such as "you may only have two children if you take this aid crop" won't work, because once they have the food, they'll go ahead and have the kids anyway (or more likely, just won't know how to not have the kids, whether you require it or not.) An agreement of "you must allow sexual health educators to talk to your people in exchange for the aid" might be closer, but again, nothing's making them take the advice to heart. What's so important about fertility that makes it override concerns about people's actual happiness over their lifetime? We're not talking about killing living people (or even living cells), we're talking about making sperm not attach to eggs. And I apologize that this has turned into a definitively-non-HN comment; it was originally—humans can be "hacked" just as well as anything else, you know—but it seems people use the arrows to express their ethical opinion, which is something I've never seen before, so I decided to defend my own ethical stance, rather than just being objective and technical like most positively-seen discussions here are.

anamax 17y ago
> To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? The suggestion is actually quite progressive, in the political sense, which should lead to upvotes.
cwan 17y ago
This is a horrifying suggestion. An individual donor at an aid agency meeting said something similar where a cost effective healthcare alternative was being developed in sub-Saharan Africa. His question was "what if you're successful? won't having more people damage the environment?" The rest of us in the room were stunned - this man explicitly valued the environment over human life. You make a similar mistake in attempting to smite a symptom. Poverty is never caused by the lack of resources - or the related overblown fears of overpopulation (look up why oil is often called the Devil's excrement where it's discovered particularly in the developing world). It's bad governments - prior and/or current. High birth rates drop dramatically after a society industrializes. What makes the suggestion repulsive (as much as it is unequivocally absurd) is that instead trying to alleviate suffering and addressing the root causes of absolute poverty, you're effectively starving and forcing deeply impoverished people who are in no position to deny food to accept sterilization. If you're reading HN, you've already hit a genetic jackpot having the opportunities that most of the world will never have. Not only would this be a slippery slope (if you accept forced sterilizations for the "greater good", why not deny needed medical drugs and treatments or worse?), it's an unnecessary slope. So instead of trying to provide the poor with economic opportunities you'd provide them with sterility?