What really drives the poor

Re:What really drives the poor by chromatic on Saturday June 25, 2011 @05:03PM (#2696577)

Not everyone is Andrew Carnegie. Perhaps other mechanisms to reduce poverty will be more effective.

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Re:What really drives the poor by temphn on Saturday June 25, 2011 @05:16PM (#2696600)

Capitalism reduced the poverty of Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Chile, and Estonia (to name a few).

What country was built from foreign aid?

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Re:What really drives the poor by chromatic on Saturday June 25, 2011 @05:43PM (#2696651)

Perhaps changing the subject from Andrew Carnegie will express my discomfort with the implicit syllogism more effectively.

Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free. Cory Doctorow has achieved great financial and literary success. Therefore, everyone who gives books away for free will achieve great financial and literary success.

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Re:What really drives the poor by tomjen3 on Sunday June 26, 2011 @07:58AM (#2697864)

I don't really buy that argument (you could take any property they shared, no matter how irrelevant, and make the same argument, i.e. they both had two feet): Cory Doctorow makes money because he has spent a large amount of time to create an audience, because he writes interesting books and because he is constantly on the lookout for new ways to monitize them.

And yeah, most people who pull that of would properly experience success.

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Re:What really drives the poor by chromatic on Friday July 01, 2011 @03:13AM (#2717355)

And yeah, most people who pull that of would properly experience success.

Agreed, but too few of the discussions I've encountered leave out that part and focus on the "Why don't you just give your books away for free?"

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Re:What really drives the poor by arethuza on Saturday June 25, 2011 @05:45PM (#2696658)

You could argue that most of Western Europe and indeed Japan was only able to recover as quickly from WW2 because of aid from the United States (e.g. the Marshall Plan in Europe) - and both areas seem to have done quite well.

Isn't it also arguable that present day countries that started as colonies also benefited from a degree of aid/investment from the countries doing the colonizing? Setting up colonies was an expensive and risky business, indeed the country I am in was forced to unite with our larger and richer neighbor to the south largely because of a failed attempt to establish such colonies:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/sc...

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Re:What really drives the poor by temphn on Saturday June 25, 2011 @08:05PM (#2696998)

The Western European nations were developed before the Marshall Plan. The Plan did not build the countries in the first place.

Re: colonialism, our fundamental difference may be that you may not believe wealth can be created (or destroyed), only redistributed. Is that a fair guess? No blame intended, the distinction between money (zero sum) and wealth (nonzero sum) is not trivial.

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Re:What really drives the poor by ebiester on Saturday June 25, 2011 @05:43PM (#2696653)

South Korea was build heavily from foreign aid, both military and otherwise. How about Japan and the Marshall plan?

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Re:What really drives the poor by wisty on Sunday June 26, 2011 @01:06AM (#2697420)

Japan was quite rich before the war. They were powerful enough to take on the US in the sea and air, and China on the ground, at once; and bounced back after the bombs stopped falling.

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Re:What really drives the poor by varjag on Saturday June 25, 2011 @06:43PM (#2696794)

Estonia wasn't really poverty-stricken.

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