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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

Well, it sort of works: massively increasing the wealth of any third world country will shift it from "if you're poor then you starve and die" to "if you're poor then you are begging on the street and sometimes working a lousy job for little money".

It's not much of an aspiration, but it is, strictly speaking, an improvement. It's also not a hypothetical: supply-side economic demonstrably works, to some extent. It just doesn't work very well, and we should be able to do better.

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I guess it's all a matter of your idiolect. It works, for some values of "works". Maybe it works for the macroeconomist studying national GDP growth rates? Sadly, there are also barbers and truck drivers.

In the countries under discussion, there aren't very many barbers and truck drivers. There are, however, a lot of starving people.

There is only a working class in a working economy.

> Well, it sort of works: massively increasing the wealth of any third world country

Things are more complicated in real world, because even if massive wealth is created (say, a boom of a certain industry), it doesn't necessarily go where it's supposed to.

Here [1] there is a real-world example of how, in a country with a strong mining industry, the "colonialists" get all the money, and the "colony" gets the crumbs (of course, that doesn't imply that this is always the case).

[1] Published long ago on HN: https://psmag.com/why-is-zambia-so-poor-f44dfeedd5ed

Two counter examples to your first statement about positive benefits of massive increases in wealth: Nigeria and Venezuela.

That's two out of how many countries where it was successful? You almost certainly live in one.

To be fair, the failings there had to do with the source of wealth being natural resources, rather than innovation per se. I'd also add Russia and Brazil to that list, but there are others. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Personally, I think it's the difference in mentality between lottery winners and builders of successful products (who often work within difficult constraints and have to become very good at problem solving to succeed). There's a reason why lottery winners do not typically compound their success.

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