<story><title>Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa.</title><url>http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmlorenzetti</author><text>When Bill Gates&apos; wife began pushing him to work on issues of third-world health, this was more or less his argument against it.  She dug up the statistics to show that this idea, while intuitive, is not supported by fact.  As health improves-- and in particular as child mortality goes down-- birth rates fall accordingly.&lt;p&gt;As we all know, Gates got on board, and now funds a lot of health research and on-the-ground initiatives.</text></item><item><author>jxcole</author><text>I don&apos;t know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The number of these new children would almost certainly be higher than the number I originally helped bring out of famine, so at that point there would be just as many if not more starving children than we had to begin with. So in my mind the question really goes the other way, how does donating money to buy food for starving children in Africa improve Africa&apos;s condition in the long term? What problems caused these nations to produce more children than food and what is being done to eliminate the source of these problems, rather than just the symptoms?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sliverstorm</author><text>As I understand it, Gates funds &lt;i&gt;health&lt;/i&gt; related research, e.g. clean drinking water or malaria. Your parent was discussing the simple provision of free food.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa.</title><url>http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmlorenzetti</author><text>When Bill Gates&apos; wife began pushing him to work on issues of third-world health, this was more or less his argument against it.  She dug up the statistics to show that this idea, while intuitive, is not supported by fact.  As health improves-- and in particular as child mortality goes down-- birth rates fall accordingly.&lt;p&gt;As we all know, Gates got on board, and now funds a lot of health research and on-the-ground initiatives.</text></item><item><author>jxcole</author><text>I don&apos;t know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The number of these new children would almost certainly be higher than the number I originally helped bring out of famine, so at that point there would be just as many if not more starving children than we had to begin with. So in my mind the question really goes the other way, how does donating money to buy food for starving children in Africa improve Africa&apos;s condition in the long term? What problems caused these nations to produce more children than food and what is being done to eliminate the source of these problems, rather than just the symptoms?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mynameishere</author><text>Health generally improves with the underlying economy, not because of charity.  The underlying economy is going to correlate with damn near other statistic one way or another.&lt;p&gt;More credibly, the &quot;War on Poverty&quot; was an abject failure in every way.</text></comment>