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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Poverty is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. If poor Africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty - If you give them the wrong kind of help, you will just allow them to survive and have more children but it wont create any long term improvements.

I think the root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible.

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* Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem". By any reasonable measure, global poverty has been cut by at least half. Keep in mind that both China and India each still have larger populations than the entire continent of Africa, and that the median Chinese and the median Indian were not in significantly better shape than the median African 50 years ago. Furthermore, some African leaders, most notably Rwanda's Paul Kagame, are now achieving some success at adapting Asian development patterns to their own conditions.

* Taiwan and South Korea did not need draconian one child policies, or any other form of population control, to become prosperous. And they've gotten much further than China. Of all the lessons you could draw from East Asia's rise, "copy the one child policy" is close to the most nonsensical. I won't deny the obvious fact that you can't sustainably have each generation be 5 times larger than the previous one, but we have tons of data points indicating that women's education, and other things you'd want to do anyway to facilitate economic development, happen to solve the "unsustainable fertility rate" problem as a side effect, and the causal mechanisms are fairly well understood (when women are permitted to do other things with their lives than serve as full-time brood mares, most of them take advantage of the additional options...).

>>Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem"

The overwhelming majority of that progress comes from replacing an evil, murderous, and incompetent dictatorship in the world's largest nation with a decent dictatorship. One faction, led at enormous personal danger by Deng Hsiaoping, replaced the preferred successors of Mao with ordinary dictators that wanted to rule a prosperous middle income country instead of a disaster area.

All the other progress in the world is small in comparison and we aren't going to see China rescued from sociopathic communism again.

There has been progress in SE Asia and India and Latin America and even some post-post-colonial recovery in Africa. There isn't that much grinding poverty in Latin America to alleviate anymore and SE Asia is getting there. But that leave the most intractable problems to deal with.

India and Africa have enormous birth rates, populations that have proven resistant to education, and local politics unfriendly to economic growth. Latin America and China brought down birth rates and raised educational achievement quickly as soon as their governments allowed it, but India and Africa have tried and the people aren't taking to either.

There are some encouraging places like Tamil Nadu and Botswana, but there are diminishing returns in development as in any industry. It gets harder and harder to grow economies once you've done the easy cases like China and Korea.

And because of birthrates, the hard cases just become a larger and larger problem. Two thirds of mankind will be Sub-Saharan African and Indian/Pakistani by 2100 according to the most optimistic projections. Will they still be grindingly poor? I hope not. Still there's no clear road from today to a decent future for most of mankind.

> India and Africa have enormous birth rates,

I don't get it. India's birth rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2012 and 2.3 children per woman in 2013, barely above replacement. We should expect it to get down below replacement rate in the next five years.

It looks like your post contains interesting thoughts, but it's hard to take the rest of it seriously when there's such extremely obvious inaccuracy.

There's also the problem that if your birth rate is below replacement your population gets old and shrinks and dies. This is a bad thing in the long term, and getting out of that situation is turning into a major challenge worldwide. We need to be very careful that we haven't swung this pendulum way too far in the wrong direction.

The One Child policy was a draconian method. A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally. Educated, empowered women choose to have fewer children, take better care of them, etc.

Sadly, you have to also start tackling religious issues: Catholicism can not further forbid abortion or use of condoms. This is seriously hurting humanity.

Catholicism also promotes the idea of the sanctity of individual life, places moral burdens on business and political leaders in countries where brutality and exploitation are the norm, and creates a culture that emphasizes and encourages education. (Not to mention the whole "creating the moral foundation Western Democracy takes for granted" thing.)

You don't need to start fighting religion to help the poor; religion has provided, for many, the most effective means of getting out poverty. Also, going in to a place and starting a fight against the local religion (be it Catholicism, Islam, neo-Jobsian technocracy) is a good way to be ignored by the people your trying to help.

I'm not saying to fight religion, but to tackle religious issues. It can not be allowed for an institution like the church continuing to forbid population control. The hopeful solution would be that the church reforms itself.

I have heard some bad stories about that - But I think it's important to decouple the policy itself from the way it was enforced.

The policy is very powerful in at least two ways: Firstly, it allows parents to focus all their energy and resources on raising and educating a single child. Then secondly, because Chinese people have fewer children, the assets in China will be inherited by fewer people which means a higher net worth per capita for the next generation.

It's a terrible policy. Have you looked into the gender imbalance in China? Google "China gender imbalance"

This policy will hurt China for decades.

> But I think it's important to decouple the policy itself from the way it was enforced.

I'm not sure you can do that and still enforce such a policy.

> A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally

Why not "improve education and rights for people globally"?

I would like to see the world become a better place for people globally. The problem with your framing is that trying to enhance the "rights" of men has a tendency to make our current problems worse. The things men typically need in order to live more balanced, healthy, full lives is an ability to provide self care instead of relying on a woman to do it, slack time that they rarely get, and so on. You could discuss that in terms of rights, but that isn't really what most people will think of when you talk about rights for men. Rights for children are legally limited because their decision making ability is still formative.

Rights for women have a well established and proven track record of counterbalancing the deficiencies of the so called "patriarchy", a term I loathe but I don't know how else to frame this particular point. Rights for women often revolve around things like maternity leave, which helps protect both the health of the child and the career of the mother. So I make statements like the above in spite of not self-identifying as a feminist because it is the most proven method I know of for moving things forward.

Hm... well, as "rights" I understand things like freedom of speech, including the ability to criticize the government, justice, no persecution, democracy, accessible healthcare, low corruption, etc... I think without these, there's little use for maternity leave or reproductive rights

Well, then I will suggest you have a poor understanding of how most women experience life. And I will also suggest that my position might make more sense if you just think of it in terms of female empowerment and try to not get too hung up on the word rights.

It's actually not impossible. Stop fueling the corruption in those countries and educate the women. Most of what perpetuates the poverty is eliminated by those 2 shifts. It's not easy...but not impossible either.

Poverty is hard to solve, but it's becoming easy to solve very quickly. Let's assume for a minute we have all the money in the world. Poverty is easily solved by removing the obstacles that are preventing the poor from being self-sufficient. But what are those obstacles? Poverty is not considered a disorder yet, and we do not have good diagnostic tools for diagnosing those obstacles.

Let's think for a second about how it if you are wealthy. If your family has enough money, you can have access to 24-hour care for much of your development, either from a stay-at-home parent or a nanny. In other words, you have a person whose full-time job is removing those obstacles and training you to detect and remove them on your own. Not everyone's parents actually do that well, but they at least had a shot at it.

That's great, but it's not useful to us for fixing poverty because it's too expensive to scale. We can't assign a full-time nanny to everyone in poverty, it'd be in the trillions of dollars.

But I think the internet changes the economics of this substantially.

For every one of those specific obstacles that is THE big blocker in a poor person's life, there is someone somewhere else in the world, who has either been there before, or seen it a million times, and who knows exactly what are the main tools you need in your toolbag if you are going to make it through that kind of situation. If we had that all of those equipment lists in a giant database for all of the world's poor, we wouldn't need a full-time nanny, we could just equip the poor person with some tools, and they would have a good shot at leveling up. Tools like I'm describing would be orders of magnitude cheaper than a full time nanny.

So there's a chunk of work for someone: How do you connect poor people with other people who have seen people get through their specific bottleneck?

Of course then they'll need some supplies and probably some ongoing hourly work by whatever relevant professionals are needed. And obviously you are paying rent and health insurance and all of that until those things become self sufficienct.

I think good information tools could bring the cost of this down from trillions to billions.

Still a lot of money, how could we make it back?

By bringing people out of poverty you basically get first crack at marketing to a totally new market. You could also make recruiting deals. I think as long as you're transparent about what is advertising and what is advice, it's morally OK to do this. Although I would love to hear other ideas about that. I am not attached to the model.

All of these transitions I'm talking about facilitating are going to have very high variability, which makes this also a very difficult endeavor to fund or insure. But if you can get all of the tools as efficient as possible, I think a relatively small amount of capital might be able to bootstrap the process. You just have to get your scale to something above the stochastic noise in the outcomes for individual clients.

Once it was bootstrapped though, you could just fund it with VC.

Poverty (within our current socioeconomic system) is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. (citation needed). If poor africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty. (Raising standards of living is pretty much guaranteed to reduce the fertility rate, you have your rate of causation backwards on this one). The root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. (Sorry, but this is a borderline racist statement, I'm not saying you intended that to be the case, just that it is). I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible. (So you think possibly one of the most authoritarian policies in recent history is the answer?)

I don't think the statement was borderline racist. It's fair to point out that a certain group has exhibited certain statistical tendencies (large numbers of children in this case), so long as that tendency is not attributed explicitly to race itself (which it wasn't here). I don't see how we could ever have a productive discussion on issues like this if just straightforward observations are torn down as racist.

I do agree with your point that most likely better education will lead to fewer children rather than fewer children leading to better education. However, clearly that's easier said than done.

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