Qom

That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that if you want to help people technological progress will be vastly more efficient than anything else, and particularly aid programs. I don't care about progress for its own sake, nobody does. I'm saying that some people are objectively more valuable than others in the long term and that we should help them instead of helping huge numbers of less productive people. A single great invention could save all those people better than any amount of aid money.

This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry.

What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs.

Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.

[1] Note that socialism designates a vast array of different ideologies and its meaning is continually evolving. It certainly did not mean the same thing in Steinbeck's time as it does today.

Edit: grammar

I've seen plenty of people who bought brand items but used them in a vulgar or trashy way: the result was that you could immediately identify them as poor, defeating the whole purpose of the "investment".

Some researchers have outlined that poverty is debilitating and impairs decision making, but there clearly are some poor people who contribute to their own fate. Advertising is partly to blame, but most of the responsibility rests with them not to buy ludicrous products in the hope of some inchoate recognition from others. Simply accusing the "white male privileged life of the mind" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Although I do not actually support socialism, I think this quote is one interesting take (of many) on the problem you've outlined.

Edit: looks like someone beat me to it by one minute.

I also find it highly doubtful that you do not care about the results of technology. Technology pretty much shapes our lives so you cannot plausibly pretend to be so blasé about it all. Our continued existence depends on the responsible use of powerful inventions so not caring about the results is a pretty unscientific and downright dangerous attitude anyway.

I honestly don't see how studying Ancient Greek for example is supposed to encourage cultural domination. The term "humanities" denotes a vast array of subjects.

If there is cultural domination going on, it's mostly with the mass media output of whichever country happens to be in a position of power at the time. For instance, the US have been flooding the market for a long while with their audio, video and written content thanks to their dominant economic position. Local production simply cannot compete with billion-dollar budgets. This leads to cultural intoxication in millions of minds around the world as they are exposed every day to the American way of viewing the world and American cultural norms. A humanities course, no matter how active in its propaganda, cannot possibly rival this kind of utter cultural domination.