I have found the solution to make poverty history

[CaptainPanic]

Wow, that is nasty. And I'm not talking about the debt, so much as the interest.

Yeah... sad, isn't it?

 

Almost all former colonies wanted independence. All we gave them was some dude on a throne. But financially, they are all still colonies, paying to their Western lords.

[Echion11]

You do know that by making that part of the earth cooler means ice ages in other parts of the world right? It's a stupid idea.

 

Donating money to the third world will not help in the long run either, unless it is a large quantity to pull the economy over the poverty threshold. That along with councelling on how to run a business and use renewable resources should however do the trick.

Edited September 28, 2010 by Echion11

[kaycee]

the only thing large mirrors would do is make all the fat and greedy people in the world take a second look at themselves.

and my solution ? have more angelina jolies in our world !

[Leader Bee]

the only thing large mirrors would do is make all the fat and greedy people in the world take a second look at themselves.

and my solution ? have more angelina jolies in our world !

 

She's not my type. Maybe more Lily Coles or Lexa Doigs though

[Myuncle]

So what happened to this thread and poverty?

[lemur]

So what happened to this thread and poverty?

Apparently it went bankrupt

 

 

 

[JohnB]

Fascinating how the answer to poverty (or any other problem) seems to be to have less dark skinned people on the planet. How nice for those in the "civilised" West to be so understanding of the problems faced by those poor, overcrowded third world nations. Free condoms, what next? Forced sterilizations? Oh wait, sorry, that's already happening.

 

Pathetic!

 

Have a look here at relative population densities. Have a good, long, hard look at which nations are most crowded.

 

Netherlands 402

Belgium 355

United Kingdom 255

Germany 229

Nigeria 167

Uganda 136

Thailand 125

 

Tell you what. Those of you who think that populations in the third world should be reduced, how about you start with your own populations first? You'd have to exterminate well over half the European population to get density down to that in the supposed "crowded" third world nations.

 

Almost all former colonies wanted independence. All we gave them was some dude on a throne. But financially, they are all still colonies, paying to their Western lords.

Captain, just because the French, Spanish, Portugese, etc didn't give a rats arse about the colonies doesn't mean all failed. The British Empire wasn't perfect, but was far superior to the others when it came to installing good governance in it's colonies etc. The simple existence of the Commonwealth is proof of that. We are more than 2 billion people, over 30% of the worlds population, living in 54 functioning democracies. Not too shabby a result.

[Moontanman]

Fascinating how the answer to poverty (or any other problem) seems to be to have less dark skinned people on the planet. How nice for those in the "civilised" West to be so understanding of the problems faced by those poor, overcrowded third world nations. Free condoms, what next? Forced sterilizations? Oh wait, sorry, that's already happening.

 

Pathetic!

 

Have a look here at relative population densities. Have a good, long, hard look at which nations are most crowded.

 

Netherlands 402

Belgium 355

United Kingdom 255

Germany 229

Nigeria 167

Uganda 136

Thailand 125

 

Tell you what. Those of you who think that populations in the third world should be reduced, how about you start with your own populations first? You'd have to exterminate well over half the European population to get density down to that in the supposed "crowded" third world nations.

 

 

Captain, just because the French, Spanish, Portugese, etc didn't give a rats arse about the colonies doesn't mean all failed. The British Empire wasn't perfect, but was far superior to the others when it came to installing good governance in it's colonies etc. The simple existence of the Commonwealth is proof of that. We are more than 2 billion people, over 30% of the worlds population, living in 54 functioning democracies. Not too shabby a result.

 

 

It's not that dark skinned people need to stop reproducing it's that all people need to stop having more children than the land they live on can support. If only one person lives on average on a square mile of land and it takes ten square miles to feed him and he insists on having 12 children then some one is gonna starve....

[Marat]

The population of Europe and much of the Caucasian world is already spontaneously declining, so no population reduction measures are necessary there. There used to be Malthusian pressures to keep populations low enough so that some minimal level of prosperity could be maintained in poor countries, but since the world now intervenes to prevent mass starvation in the Third World, these pressures against population increases outstripping resources and infrastructure no longer operate. I wonder if the world the Gates Foundation is doing to wipe out communicable diseases in the Third World is eventually only going to make problems worse by the resulting population increases.

 

Even though wealth transfers from the richer to the poorer parts of the world will not create the basis for a long-term resolution of poverty, they will if they are continued forever. Wasn't the Tobin tax on pointless, speculative currency manipulation supposed to generate sufficient funds to wipe out hunger in the Third World? Too bad the speculators have sufficient influence with the various governments of the world that their interest in being able to speculate tax-free trumped the interest of the world's poor to eat.

 

Estimates of the costs of the various pointless wars the U.S. has recently conducted vary considerably, but I've seen ball-park figures of $1.5 trillion for the mistaken invasion of Iraq (if only we could have afforded to wait another few weeks for the Blix Report showing that there were no WMDs!) and another $1 trillion for the invasion of Afghanistan, to which the Taliban and al-Quaida will return after we withdraw over the next few years. So just from those two useless invasions we have $2.5 trillion, which at $3 a day required to keep a poor person in the Third World from starving adds up to 250,000,000 people kept from hunger for 10 years. Not a bad result to achieve at the cost of merely losing the joy of having ruined Iraq and Afghanistan, killed hundreds of thousands of the local people, plus many thousands of our own troops -- all to prevent as many Americans dying from the repeat of a terrorist incident which killed as many U.S. residents in 2001 as died from accidental drowning that year.

[JohnB]

It's not that dark skinned people need to stop reproducing it's that all people need to stop having more children than the land they live on can support. If only one person lives on average on a square mile of land and it takes ten square miles to feed him and he insists on having 12 children then some one is gonna starve....

 

Here'a an idea. How about we help them get away from subsistence agriculture and use more first world techniques. Things like tractors instead of oxen and fertilisers and pesticides. Then the land can support more people. Your way is to reduce the population to the levels supportable by subsistence agriculture, pre industrial. Do you really want them to stay in a medieval state? The West has no problems feeding its much higher population densities due to the techniques used, why should the third world be different? The simple fact of the matter is that the third world is not overpopulated. Using better farming techniques and building a first world economy would allow them to have at least twice the populations they do and still reduce poverty to Western levels. People don't cause poverty, lack of economic development causes poverty. It really is that simple.

 

But I guess it's better for the West to keep them poor and starving and a cheap workforce.

 

Maybe I'm getting cynical, but I've noticed that part of the answer to every ecological problem for the last 30 years is that the third world musn't industrialise to first world standards. There is an underlying philosophy at work. Rather than trying to make a bigger cake for people to have a piece of, there is an active movement to reduce the size of the cake or to demand that people have smaller shares. This is worldwide. Population increased in your area? Don't build a dam to supply more water, just put people on permanent water restrictions instead. As the Brits will soon learn, not building power stations will lead to rolling blackouts as the old ones go offline. The Green God is insane.

 

Talk about development and increasing a standard of living and you immediately hit the new buzzword "sustainability". The problem is that nobody has bothered to actually define the word. The thing is that with more development and more mining and more cheap energy and a bigger economy, more people can sustain a higher standard of living. For reasons known only to deluded personalities this is somehow a bad thing.

[Marat]

I agree with you entirely that the modern Green Movement fails to consider the scale of lifestyle adjustments that are going to be required to achieve its goals. The chief economist of the British Green Movement actually said that people would come to be satisfied with 'green benefits' in place of the commodities that the current economy had gotten them used to needing. So even if you now had to live in a cave and use a wax candle for illumination, you would be fine with that because of how much you'd enjoy the fresher air, the cleaner water, and the greener vistas. While that is of course foolish, if you accept the hypothesis that further industrial development is going to destroy the planet through greenhouse gas production, how do you resolve the tensions between the need to downsize the economy and the lifestyle expectations of the population?

[praty]

The only effective way to irradiate poverty, IMO, is empowerment of women.

Give them a control over their birth cycle so they can stop reproducing at a rate similar to rest of the animal kingdom.

And the empowerment would generally uplift the whole locality/village/town.

So, provide them with education, make them aware and most importantly provide them a means of birth control.

 

While mirrors might be a good idea, they might ruin the local ecology and moreover the physical maintenance and repairs of the mirrors could and would cost a fortune.

Also, if it does solve the problem it will be temporary as the mirrors won't change the lifestyle (will just make the the money factor go away, not the backward thinking) so population explosion will continue on, which will require more mirrors as the people spread across wider area.

[Marat]

Although the dominance of feminist ideology today absolutely requires 'women's empowerment' to be the solution to everything, somewhat the way 'Aryan empowerment' was the solution to everything in 1930s Germany, actually that is not the best method to deal with Third World overpopulation and the poverty it causes.

 

The reason why people -- both men and women, I have to say rather unfashionably -- in poor countries want large numbers of children is that there are no social insurance systems in those countries, so the only insurance families have against one member becoming sick or the parents becoming old and unable to work is to have a large number of children to support them out of familial affection. In this way poverty breeds poverty, since poverty initially causes there to be no money to create a national social safety-net, which in turn requires each family to produce its own social safety-net in terms of its children, which then creates too high a population for the natural and institutional resources to sustain.

[praty]

Marat,

 

You are right about poverty breeding poverty but in most cases men and (more often) women don't know they can educate themselves and their children to get out. I think both genders need to be aware but the reason I vibrate more towards women is because they are oppressed more.

 

Well, so can you say empowerment of women won't work?

[Marat]

If we start with giving better education to women so they become empowered to gain control over the number of their pregnancies, and this in turn reduced the population in countries with too many people already for the local economy to sustain, that would seem a good thing. Until we consider that the poor families now deprived of enough children to support them financially in their old age or to ensure the other members against financial or medical disasters will suffer and perhaps die out, which would be a terrible price to pay for population decrease. Also, a more educated family would see this problem coming and still decide to have a large number of strong, young, and employable children to cushion itself against the threats of unemployment, ill health, injury, and old age for the rest of the family, especially its senior members. In this they are not irrational, but are just facing up to the same problem which Western governments are confronting on a large scale, which is that declining birth rates mean that there are now too few working young people to support the pensions of the many senior citizens.

 

You could say that more educated women may take their skills, leave their homelands, work in more developed countries for higher salaries, and send their surplus income back home. But the males in Third World countries have already been doing this for a long time, which is why remittances make a major reduction in poverty in countries like Mexico and the Philippines.

[rktpro]

That's very simple. I am not looking for any recognition or patent. The poor countries are those affected by too hot weather. Too hot weather means too harsh conditions and no water. Harsh conditions and lack of water means poverty. So the solution is to cool down the hot areas with giant space mirrors. This will bring to them the same amount of water and richness you see in the western world. Yes, giant space mirrors is the solution, what are they waiting for??

 

Your approach to poverty is too limited. Lack of water and harsh conditions only mean less availability of resources, not that people tend to be always poor in that region or area. And too hot weather won't always mean lack of water.

For one second let me consider it. But how you gonna destroy corruption by it? Would you be able to provide more standard of living, high literacy, low infant mortality rate, high enrollment ratio?

Poverty cycle is too difficult to break. And by just adding water, you won't be able to do anything.

Even water would become a dream for the poor because many poor countries experience economical-ineuqalities.

Tackling poverty with water seems same like hitting a giant Sea Monster with water gun.

 

 

[Myuncle]

But how you gonna destroy corruption by it? Would you be able to provide more standard of living, high literacy, low infant mortality rate, high enrollment ratio?

 

Why in USA and Europe people can afford an education? Because they are wealthy countries. And why are they wealthy? Because of cool weather and water (and democracy....ok... In Russia they had water and cool weather for a long time but Communism was the problem...). So I agree with you that you need education to break poverty, but how can you can get an education if there is poverty? Space mirrors would bring water, cool weather and wealth, wealth will bring education at the same time. Imagine the Sahara desert disappearing and becoming a green grass to welcome all the people from overcrowded nations, that would be amazing.

[rktpro]

Why in USA and Europe people can afford an education? Because they are wealthy countries. And why are they wealthy? Because of cool weather and water (and democracy....ok... In Russia they had water and cool weather for a long time but Communism was the problem...). So I agree with you that you need education to break poverty, but how can you can get an education if there is poverty? Space mirrors would bring water, cool weather and wealth, wealth will bring education at the same time. Imagine the Sahara desert disappearing and becoming a green grass to welcome all the people from overcrowded nations, that would be amazing.

 

You are putting me in dilemma. How can you say that providing water and cool weather would decrease poverty?

IMO, it wouldn't. Availability of water in developed countries is due to the fact that they were ample in resources either natural or human resource. The nations which are currently poor are not ample in human resource. Providing water would only provide on resource. Water helps in establishing industries, no doubt. But water won't create human resource. It won't provide education. Neither water and cool temperature could increase living standard and curb poverty.

Look at the causes of poverty. Do you think providing water would lead to ecological stability, control on ever increasing population?

Causes of Poverty

 

 

 

Poverty would be partially solved if we would just pay a fair price for products... but the entire world economy is build on the inequality of income. We outsource work to poor countries because the people get paid much less... and that's considered a sane and smart way to run a business, rather than pure extortion or coercion on a continental scale!

 

If you want to solve poverty... then I completely agree (no sarcasm here) that space mirrors are probably the best option... because I cannot see humanity learning the lesson.

 

Not entirely. Poverty is due to a number of reasons and the economical disadvantage of exporting make only, say 10% of it. What about the rest?

Outsourcing if Business is due to poverty. Not that poverty is due to it.

Edited June 21, 2011 by rktpro

[Myuncle]

But water won't create human resource. It won't provide education.

 

Water is the basis for any economy. Water means agriculture, agricultere means food, food means wealth, wealth means education. How can you get an education without water? Which one of them come first?

[rktpro]

Water is the basis for any economy. Water means agriculture, agricultere means food, food means wealth, wealth means education. How can you get an education without water? Which one of them come first?

 

No doubt water means agriculture. But making a country developed requires development in secondary and tertiary sector. Agriculture is a support to these factors. Wealth doesn't necessarily mean education. Before the renaissance, people tend to be wealthy but weren't human resource. Water is a supporting factor to develop human resource but it isn't the only factor which decides it. There are other major factors which need to be active.

And economists know better. Did Amartya Sen ever said that water is what a country needs?

[CoBases]

I don't think that it is all about a water or money.

 

I do think that is because of information, knowledge and experience.

 

If you would give money and water for some village deep in Africa I don't think they will get out of poverty anytime soon

 

They have no clue what people are doing in developed countries, what researches are made, what are trens, what needs to take into consideration and so on. They are just clueless and they desperately needs education

[Myuncle]

I don't think that it is all about a water or money.

 

I do think that is because of information, knowledge and experience.

 

If you would give money and water for some village deep in Africa I don't think they will get out of poverty anytime soon

 

They have no clue what people are doing in developed countries, what researches are made, what are trens, what needs to take into consideration and so on. They are just clueless and they desperately needs education

 

But how can you give them education? You need schools, good teachers etc. You can't just give them an iPad and allow them to self-educate without water. I know water it's nothing without education and democracy, but it's the first step anyway.

[CoBases]

Of course it is almost impossible to educate those people and of course they won't be able to learn if they haven't eat or drink for a days

 

If this questions would be so simple, then there won't be any sign for poverty

But how can you give them education? You need schools, good teachers etc. You can't just give them an iPad and allow them to self-educate without water. I know water it's nothing without education and democracy, but it's the first step anyway.

[Myuncle]

Well, how about you make it space solar panels instead? They'll still block the sunlight, and as a bonus can beam down power to provide electricity ..

 

Exactly, if all the nations want to make the effort they could do it easily, each nation has got to agree and collaborate to the project. It's like wearing sunglasses in the sunshine to protect yourself, you can survive even without sunglasses but you just feel more comfortable if you wear them. We can survive without space mirrors but why not to try them? And if something goes wrong they would be easy to remove anyway.

[Stefan-CoA]

I don't think it's a geographical problem. It's more of an educational one. A lot of these countries were severely battered by colonialism. Some of them even have rather temperate climates and a lot of water. Giant space mirrors won't do much except piss people off when they hear how much they cost. Plus, who's going to maintain them? There's a bunch of debris flying around the earth at velocities enough to shatter steel, nevermind glass. And if we remove space mirrors? What are you going to do with mirrors large enough to deflect sunlight off of half the world? Maybe then the poor people could admire their poverty?

 

It's an education thing. And a political one.