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by imtringued
1996 days ago
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>>It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone
>Listen to yourself. This isn't normal, but on markets, it is. If you treat starving kids as important then you will have more starving kids. If you treat starving kids as unimportant or undesirable you will try your best to prevent them from being created in the first place. The vast majority of necessary policies that you need to change in the relevant countries have absolutely nothing to do with individual charity. A lot of what is needed is simple infrastructure projects. People waste their time acquiring water on foot instead of getting a water truck delivery. You can drive a water truck for 600 miles and it's still more economical than walking. The problem is often that there are no roads suitable for 20 ton trucks. You'll get stuck on the dirt roads so no delivery happens at all. People think of complicated solutions like drone delivery of medicine because the government fails to maintain or set up basic infrastructure. It all boils down to government corruption and people's desire to work around it. It's not going to work out. |
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If you care about cancer patients you will have more cancer patients? This is nonsense because you framed it wrong. Caring about [something] isn't necessarily about perpetuating or creating more [something], it's about solving (on of) the problem(s) behind it. And this can have solid economic value. On top of it you can have a layer of humanity where you do something purely for the the well being of another.
To the point, "caring about starving kids" means "caring about solving starvation". This has plenty of implications, not the least of which are that you developed tech that can be applied elsewhere, or that you just created a new market where the participants have a chance of actually paying because they have a chance at a disposable income. You "created" new valuable members of society capable of producing and consuming your products or services.
The reason starving kids don't pull that much attention is that "solving" starvation has a shaky business case, far from guaranteed success, and very unclear timeline. Things most businesses shy away from.
Why do you think Facebook is investing in internet in India or Africa? It's not because they care about people with no internet so by your reasoning they'll create more people with no internet. It's because they are untapped markets that need to be brought up just to the point where they become profitable. You have to spend money to make money. So far the case for solving world hunger has that threshold too high for today's "make money now" stock price driven business models.