[lug] One laptop per child

[David Kritzberg]

Nate Duehr had this to say on [Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 04:30:13PM -0700]:
> dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
> 
> As far as the laptop project goes...
> 
> People look after their own best interests.  Period.  If these guys feel 
> better, wake up happy, and generally have shinier hair and gleaming 
> white teeth because they're shipping laptops to the third world, more 
> power to 'em.

I'm sure vanity plays some role in any philanthropic activity, but
your claim is tautoligical and ad hominem.

> They won't fix the real root-cause problems of many poverty stricken 
> places, because they are related to the pro-creation instinct hard-coded 
> into our DNA.
> 
> That instinct (and many others - selfish hunter/gatherer instincts we 
> base our entire society off of) rarely serve us well anymore, but 
> haven't disappeared from our genetic makeup, yet.
> 
> They may not be gone from our genetic code soon enough to keep us from 
> killing our species or our planet.  Certainly not soon enough to save 
> the next few generations from ourselves.
> 
> So let people ship kids laptops or find people find clean water, or 
> whatever... none of them will address the root-cause problems, inherent 
> inside us.  Let them do it because it makes them feel better about 
> themselves.

Top-down projects intended to help poorer places in the world develop
more quickly have yielded mixed results for a variety of reasons,
including the problem of institutions in those poor places.  

But you seem to be saying that these poor places cannot be helped by
anyone because of some hard-coded limitation in the DNA of the kids
who would be receiving free laptops.  Am I misunderstanding?

If this is true, then I could ask why *any* part of the world is
developed?  Or, are you suggesting that the people in poor countries
are genetically inferior to people in rich countries?  

> There's a very real chance that in order to build these cheap laptops, 
> they're enslaving a whole new group of people to build them, while 
> attempting to help others out of poverty.  Just moving the pain around.

For this statement to make sense, you would be implicitly assuming
that people working for 3rd-world wages had a better alternative.
Half the world lives on less than $2/day.  On the contrary, increasing
the demand for products that are made in 3rd world manufacturing
plants is a side benefit of this program, regardless of how successful 
it is in its stated aim. 

Dave Kritzberg