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Re:Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems by specialist on Saturday January 26, 2013 @12:24PM (#5120981)
Sometimes "free" is too expensive.

Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.

Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.

Re:Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems by dllthomas on Saturday January 26, 2013 @06:01PM (#5122165)
My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.
Re:Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems by rdwallis on Saturday January 26, 2013 @03:01PM (#5121555)
I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling.

Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?

Re:Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems by TDL on Saturday January 26, 2013 @01:31PM (#5121194)
I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.