Comment by duncan_bayne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duncan_bayne | Hacker News Reader

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That's because historically, there's been one escape from third-world extreme poverty: capitalism.

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=770

Since its economic liberalization reforms in 1991, India’s average income has increased by 7.5 percent per year. That means that average income has more than tripled over the last quarter century. As wealth increased, the poverty rate in India declined by almost 24 percent. But most significantly, for the Dalits – the poorest and lowest caste in Indian society – the poverty rate during this period declined even faster, by 31 percent. That means that in the nation that has by far the largest number of people in extreme poverty, it is the people at the very bottom of the social strata who are getting richer faster.

You can't, and won't, 'fix' broken States with technology, or charity, or education. First, they must fix their political systems to enable the creation, saving and investment of wealth.

It's a source of some surprise to me that the above is ever controversial among folks who admire Paul Graham, and have read his essays on wealth creation.

I think this is right in the sense that, people struggling to survive are offered no choice but to play by the rules of a system that otherwise leaves them to die. It's frying pan or fire, so of course they have to be capitalists.

Over the first two centuries of industrial revolution, lifting the bottom ~billion out of drought, malnutrition and early death has never been pursued for its own sake or incentivized in its own right. But it has sometimes been a fortunate, peripheral outcome of working within systems structured first and foremost by the flow of capital, as you correctly note with the example of India's relatively recent economic liberalization.

There's a simple problem: if you're the top dog and desperately need to keep your population fed, you have to have the food to do that. But if your society is structured so that it cannot efficiently produce enough food, or other goods, you're unable to do that, no matter how good your intentions are.

It was exactly the problem that killed Soviet Union: by winter of 1985, there was not enough food to even distribute via the then-imposed food stamp system. This led to a change of course that ultimately ended up with the dissolution of USSR and a new rise of the capitalist Russia.

>> I think this is right in the sense that, people struggling to survive are offered no choice but to play by the rules of a system that otherwise leaves them to die. It's frying pan or fire, so of course they have to be capitalists.

so find a better system. What has worked so far, in practice?

You are 100% right.

In Cuba, at the outset of the 2000s, Fidel got obsessed with the Moringa plant... he would go on on television to rant about all its purported medicinal properties and economic value. Irony, nobody needed a miraculous plant, but there was, and there is, a deer lack of common sense when it comes to economic development.

The less state (politics is power), the more capitalism (private property is power).

This is basically a way of saying, the rich won’t help you unless you help them get richer.

Which is fine, I suppose. It seems to be a force of nature.

The rich will help plenty but it’ll be a drop in the bucket unless you can do something productive yourself. The aid industry has spent enormous sums on band aids for the problem of poverty but the only cure is economic development.

If a country’s government is ineffective and corrupt they can waste arbitrary amounts of money and have nothing to show for it in the end but some bureaucrats who ate nice meals and had nice cars before the crap roads and lack of maintenance turned them into junk.

Aid just isn’t terribly effective generally. You can’t make incompetent people rich or even middle income and have it stick. If you can help them become competent they’ll deal with poverty themselves.

I must be missing a part of your argument.

The parent says that no single technology "solves" the problems of poverty. The biggest strides to improving quality of life measures are made when people are permitted to try to improve their own lives.

Local markets means people from the same economic stratum helping each other. Where do "the rich" enter into it at all? Are you one of "the rich", with a disposable income many times the total income of people suffering from inadequate clean water? Why aren't you "helping"? What would "help" look like, in your vision?

Capitalism is, of course, a technology.

The point being that Capital is interested in “helping” to the extent the “help” generates an ROI.

Many of these countries have local markets.

They also suffer when capital captures regulatory / gov agencies, and those agencies pass laws that benefit capital.

Much of the world is getting by on $350-$750 / year, so my guess is that >90% of folks reading hacker news are making 100x that of these folks.

Not to mention instances where capital leverages local labor and resources and leaves the community worse off. Ie, water being used to make Coke and exporting it.

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