Poverty-Fighting Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#31

Post by Frondo » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

eartheaterrr wrote: post #23

lsc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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?

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#32

Post by ksk » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:30 AM UTC

How are these startups planning to pay back the VC money? The poor don't exactly have a lot of money. Where are they going to get the money from? I am skeptical anytime a VC invests in "solving poverty".

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#33

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #27

john_moscow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 exa…

> 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#34

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:34 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #27

john_moscow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 exa…

> 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#35

Post by jjoonathan » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:34 AM UTC

Fuzzy_Logic wrote: post #20

john_moscow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 exa…

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/excursion…

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.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#36

Post by stale2002 » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:36 AM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #9

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 t…

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.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#37

Post by aaron-lebo » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:37 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #27

john_moscow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 exa…

> 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 t…

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.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#38

Post by demxzy » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:38 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #25

hyperion2010 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 issu…

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?

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.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#39

Post by raquo » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:42 AM UTC

eartheaterrr wrote: post #23

lsc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There's a huge gap between the current situation and a system where people on welfare who choose not to work are able to live "comfortably" in perpetuity.

Somewhere within that gap is a decent system where poor people don't starve but are still incentivized to improve their situation.

I also don't really see how having children relates to any of this.

On the other hand, automation will probably force us into a welfare state one way or another.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#40

Post by hyperion2010 » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #25

hyperion2010 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 issu…

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?

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.)