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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Solving world hunger is only a $30 billion problem:

http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

Americans spend $12 billion on bottled water:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bottled-water-costs-2000x-mor...

Criticizing someone for doing good in the world while still enjoying their lives is a bit immature. As you've mentioned, we all have luxuries with our large screen TV's, cars, homes, etc.

Americans spend $60 billion on their pets every year: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/americans-will-spen...

Rather than complaining that rich people aren't doing enough, perhaps a lot more people can make more of an effort.

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The problem isn't total resources, it's effective resource allocation. Even if Americans spent $0 on bottled water next year, it still takes organization and effort to somehow divert all of those small bottled water purchases to a more noble task. That is why arguments about spending $X on one thing instead of another really only work if it is truly one entity spending that $X and could realistically divert it to a different goal.

Aren't there organizations that exist to solve all sorts of problems? Cancer, Parkinson's, world hunger, disaster relief, malaria, clean water.

The point is that there are plenty of resources and it's just a matter of building up good organizations.

I don't mean to disagree with the entirety of your point, only that distribution is itself a problem to be solved. And even the organizations that you list are only designed to take it from willing donations to the desired causes. Each one of the customers not buying bottled water would need to separately perform the task of contacting one of these orgs and donating that money instead, every single time they would otherwise buy bottled water. That's also not counting any time or effort spent auditing potential donation targets for their ability to perform the stated goal.

No one said that the solution is for someone to pay an organization every time you would buy a bottle of water.

And no one is overlooking the fact that distribution is important. No one said that it wasn't.

There's enough food produced to feed 10 billion people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger...

My entire point wasn't to spell out how to solve world hunger, it was to illustrate that problems like this are within our reach. There's no need to ask "rich people" to solve every problem in the world.

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