Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s…
> despite living in a rich planet people are starving A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd.
Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$ a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!
Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty decreased again!
What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.