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Noah Smith has written this wonderful article on poverty and the importance of defeating it. A few quotes but you should read the whole thing.
To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition, not just of humanity but of the entire Universe. If humanity simply doesn’t build anything — farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power stations — we will exist at the level of wild animals. This is simply physics
Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. But our intelligence has given us an opportunity not afforded to other animals — the chance to conceive of our species as a single team, fighting not individually but as an army united against the implacable, elemental foe of poverty and desolation.
It is our highest task to push that foe ever backward, to build out the fortress of industrial modernity, to reclaim the Earth for the safety and comfort of beings that think and feel. The Earth, and eventually, all the other places as well.
