Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by joannanewsom 1254 days ago
I donate 5% of my income to Malaria Consortium and Clean Air Task Force. It could be more, but it's significant for me. I would encourage you to look at givewell.org and donate to help people living in extreme poverty.

I'm surprised you think I'm conservative. :)

1 comments

In that case, I apologize. I mistook genuine questions for obtuseness and the typical misdirectional hand-waving. With this new insight let me try again. You are right, I agree that as a policy equal-pay-for-equal work will indeed lead to a reduction in outsourcing. The solution to poverty in that case can be 2-fold (a) direct reparations, and (b) Marshall plans like for Germany and the world after WW2 [1].

It turns out that the Marshall plan was a large set of grants for billions of $ (big money in those days). There were some loans too with reasonable terms and reasonable payments, and because of natural inflation over time the payments became insignificant compared to the size of the German economy [2]. Maybe a modern day Marshall Plan with a mix of reasonable loans and grants is a good way to not shortchange either us Americans or the recipients.

Compare that with the outsourcing fiasco that has been Industry moving to China due to cheaper labor there. This did make the Chinese better off, and made the industrialists very very rich, but it gutted the American heartland and impoverished the people there, leading to the rise of Christian extremism and fascism in the US. We don't know yet if this was a fatal blow to the body politic and democracy worldwide, it's an ongoing crisis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/18/who-still-owes-what-for-the-...