111–120 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my point, I want as much of the "let's fund the military-industrial complex" money as possible to go to NASA. Right now they're struggling on funding.
It seems like NASA is always "struggling" to get funding, when in reality, there have been very few years when their budget wasn't higher than the previous year[0], even when taking inflation into account. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
I don't know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The…
You have to couple it with healthcare, education, infrastructure and economy reform (because the famine was most likely caused by a failing economy) and maybe political reform. It's more or less rebooting the place.
I don't know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The…
I would think that a life lifted from poverty, even temporarily through aid, has a much better chance of being one of these human++'s. Without quantifying (and denying) this possibility, calculating the value of aid seems impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nun, in the 1970s, in Zambia, is not going to have easy access to economics textbooks.
As if she lived there her whole life, never had a standard education, never had any opportunity whatsoever to access a standard library?
It would seem quite reasonable for a nun who received her regular education that early to possibly have grown up going to a religious school somewhere where the idea of teaching topics such as economics to a woman would not have been particularly favoured, and/or where the use of a "standard library" to read texts outside of the curriculum would have been discouraged.
In other words, depending on the wording of the original letter, it might very well have been entirely reasonable to assume that she would not have had any knowledge of economics (for that matter, you could assume a fairly substantial percentage of adults today would benefit from the explanation he gave).
It certainly reads better than "We need to funnel some money to the guys who build the rockets so that, if the Russians get frisky, we can credibly threaten to can end the world."
>He was a member of the German rocket development team at Peenemünde Just the guy to be answering ethical questions...
Anyone who discounts a thoughtful response based on some other criteria than that found in that response is not someone qualified to comment about ethics.
I don't know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The…
Countries that improve living standards usually get lower birth rates as a result. This usually results from better education for women more career opportunities for women, lower child mortality, better financial certainty, etc. This effect has been seen in almost every country to undergo a significant improvement in living standards and it is pretty much known to be true.
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When Bill Gates' wife began pushing him to work on issues of third-world health, this was more or less his argument against it. She dug up the statistics to show that this idea, while intuitive, is not supported by fact. As health improves-- and in particular as child mortality goes down-- birth rates fall accordingly. As we all know, Gates got on board, and now funds a lot of health research and on-the-ground initia…
Health generally improves with the underlying economy, not because of charity. The underlying economy is going to correlate with damn near other statistic one way or another. More credibly, the "War on Poverty" was an abject failure in every way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
Of course we have more poverty now but keep in mind that most laws and policies associated with the war on poverty were stopped or reversed somehow or other.
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Excessive influence of religion leads to poverty, poor health, and a high child mortality rate? Do you have any sources to back this besides a general feeling that religion is "bad"?
TED Talk Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset: Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. All the religions in the world are fully [able] to maintain their values and adapt to this new world. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_at_state.html
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> But if you do nothing the second generation would be even larger still since the fertility rate of the extremely poor is so high. Obviously the population must eventually plateau or decline, due to finite resources. I think it will be extremely difficult to alleviate the cause of poverty in many African countries. It seems that they have a high fertility rate mainly because their religion/culture demands it. It see…
Your entire view in this thread sounds very Ehrlichian to me. Just to explain, Paul R. Ehrlich was wrong when he predicted hundreds of millions of Indians would die because of famines and people still ask questions to him about this just to amuse themselves. I believe anyone holding similar beliefs will be wrong again, at least for the next half century.