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Comment by lquist | Hacker News Reader

What's with all the hype around Watsi? A non profit oriented approach to poverty is doomed to forever be nothing more than a vanity exercise. The scale of resources needed to attack the problems of poverty can only come from two places: governments or capital markets. Historically, governments have shown themselves to not be terribly able in this regard.

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They're not trying to fix poverty itself. They're trying to fix the medical problems of people who are poor.

The same criticism applies: attempts to solve the problems (e.g., medical) of poverty in non-scalable ways are futile at best.

There are a lot of people who are economically marginal but potentially rising with the tide, who suffer a medical ailment or other specific setback, and then end up essentially doomed (along with their kids, etc.). I mean, look at the...50% (? I forget the real number) of bankruptcies caused by medical bills in the US, where even poor people are essentially rich.

Solving someone's one-time problem for $500-1000 and letting him and his family get back to growing along with the rest of their economy seems anything but futile.

By your logic, a person should never try to save another person's life, because so many people die that you can't even make a dent.

I wonder if the right charities could get just enough people on their feet that they could start to reform their governments from the inside. Then the big change could come from governments, when they were finally "of the people".

That is such an odd rant and more importantly so far from the mark. We seem to be only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done with crowdfunding.

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