Paul Polak: An Open Letter to Larry Page
Dear Mr. Polak!
I respect the good will and intelligence behind your statements, but I also think that this idea is quite simple and straightforward. Have you thought about why intelligent and risk loving institutions and companies like Google don't do that already? I think they have checked history and found how the human element corrupts the good will. I can show you tons of examples right now in Europe...
Why? This is simple math and three simple words: this makes profit! (selling the time and resources of "poor" people through goods and services to "rich" people, the difference is the holy grail; to increase it you have to keep or increase the difference)
Our whole economy is based on the cheap work time, and unfortunately literally, cheap life of poor people; and "luckily enough", they live far away from us, in "poor regions". Ending poverty means ending the tension in the battery of the economy. "Luckily enough" again, if you give power to an institution to lift up a region, the people there will start lifting with themselves, and the region remains poor, and cheap workforce. Evolution is a hard stuff: whatever you see around you is something that fits the best to the REAL motivations - even if it does not look nice.
Is it hopeless? NO. But to solve it, we have to start with thinking instead of dreaming. Accepting that the words poor and rich are already WRONG, and that thinking this way you create and keep the problem that you wish to solve. The only way out is accepting a conscious, equal cooperation among all human beings. I know that it sounds even more weird than "ending poverty", but at least it is not a fatal failure of logic. My version starts like this: http://hajnalvilag.blogspot.hu/2014/05/a-question-for-7-billion.html (and there are much more, I really spend a lot of time on this :-) )
For clarity: I think both Mr Page and Mr Polak are wrong...
This is the beauty of formal logic against common sense: if you have two totally opposite opinions, there is still no guarantee that one of them is right ;-)
