I agree that travel can definitely open our eyes to various conditions outside our own culture.

However, the cost of travelling often could be put directly towards donations. There are so many opportunities to serve close to home in our own communities that often get overlooked because that kind of volunteering doesn't sound as glamorous as building schools in Africa.

I hate the Gates foundation.

You know what would help those kids a lot more than your medicine? Copies of all existing textbooks in an electronic format and access to all of our patents.

When the polio vaccine was created the inventor refused to get a patent for it, saying no one has the right to own it just like no one has the right to own the sun.

I just find it very hard to support the Gates foundation when I believe that it is playing by the rules to make the founders look and feel good instead of actually challenging laws and cultural assumptions, which it truly should.

I agree with the sentiment about all lives being equal.

That is why I enjoyed challenging myself to think about it purely from an economic perspective one day. We were on the plane, and the guy next to us was studying "humanitarian economics". It is somewhat related to the issues that the gates foundation has to think about when distributing their funds.

There was some curious dilemmas you need to face, and most of them seem to be faced by removing yourself somewhat from the moral aspect, and thinking purely about assigning a monetary value to them. The bit that I remember was thinking about the financial value of a human life, as determined by its remaining potential. What this means is [0]:

- Small babies: haven't invested much time and effort into developing them, so they are not worth as much.

- Teenagers: Have spent considerable amount of time getting them ready to contribute to society.

- Older people: Although there has been a lot of effort invested in them, and they have contributed a lot to society, there is only so much more "potential" left.

Another interesting thing about this approach, is that in a funny way, it mimics the sentiment of Belinda's statement of all lives being equal. This is because (equally aged) people from Africa and Australia have the same monetary value according to this.

[0] - Please don't hate me! I' actually quite a nice person, I just found this interesting :) It's not how I normally think about people.

I think the idea that all lives have equal values, while it sounds good, is paradoxical. If a life has a potential to save plenty of other lives (for example : healthcare worker, great scientist on the verge of discovering a new cure, engineer working on a more efficient way to get drinking water), doesn't that mean that their lives are worth more ? On the other hand I can't help myself thinking that a surgeon isn't worth more than an unemployed guy who does nothing except watching TV (for example), moral isn't always about logic.

All lives don't have equal current value, but the do have equal eventual value - I'll explain that in a moment (please note: I mean financial/economic value as I believe the term "moral/intrinsic" value to be so vague and undefined as to be completely useless as a thought model or reasoning tool - I understand what Melinda means).

This is empirically correct - a poor person in Africa is worth less than a rich American - by definition of earning capacity, consuming capacity, life expectancy and investment in their quality of life.

Please note: This does not mean the American is better than the African - it's merely an accident of birth.

Now here's the point I'm going to make.

Keeping people alive has exponential value - irrelevant of current value (e.g. African vs. American). What is the cost of keeping a poor African alive? I'm going to say for ~90% of the population it'll be around $1-4K a year. Now this is relatively expensive - however you must remember, this African will go on to consume and work all their lives, have kids who themselves will have kids and so forth - a combinatorial explosion of development and production making us all the richer.

Think of it like this: We are all descendant from a group of ~2000 people from Central Africa ~250,000 years ago. They produced ~7 billion people over the course of a few hundred thousand years - that's some seriously insane value generation right there. Imagine if we did the same with the ~7 billion we have now - we could be the ~2000 of the next millennium.

Each life you save today means hundreds or even thousands in the future - it's like an exponential investment. This is why we should protect poor people - apart from fuzzy moralistic reasons. It is a financially sound investment.

Each poor person will be an eventual consumer and producer - we must maximise their ability to do so - and that is why we must fundamentally help them. It also feels good.

This is what I find so toxic about the entire Republican/private health care in America debate. You invest millions over the course of people's lives to keep them alive (schools/roads/bridges/cheap loans/national security/etc.) and all of a sudden, if they get sick, you're happy that they metaphorically shoot themselves in the head because of their sickness (bankruptcy/can't afford/die etc.). Hence, you must also be happy when this kills the ability of their families to consume, produce and reproduce by an order of magnitude for the foreseeable future. We must keep people alive not merely because it's a good investment in aggregate, and not merely because it is the correct thing to do, but also because it's financially nonsensical to do otherwise - especially in a first world country. People are expensive, they take huge amounts of resources to bring up, and they have a high ROI - we should protect these investments for the sake of protecting our collective future.

Secondly, pushing birth control doesn't do jack to population growth. The vast majority of variance in development/population rates between countries is explained by GDP per capita. Or as Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India once stated:

> Development is the best contraceptive.

-- Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

Disclaimer:

Just to reiterate - I am not saying that one human is better than another in any sense of fundamental long-term value. I merely state that current value of any one human is grossly unequal due to path-dependent birth (born in America vs. Afghanistan) - however I mean to strongly imprint upon you that that the current value of a human doesn't matter in the long term - because humans in aggregate are worth the same over many generations because:

> In the long run we are all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes

What matters is how we ensure the survival of a vibrant next generation, regardless of race, creed or birth.

Wow, and a crazy trolling biblical comment on it already, saying that people in the third world must deserve what they get because their idle ... amazing.

At first I thought this would be a case for veganism.

http://hardtruthsfromsoftcats.tumblr.com/post/35274152116 (Same amount of justification as Melinda gave. To the point of traveling to open one's eyes, I have a friend who gave up on the African continent entirely after learning more about its countries.)

There is no such thing as intrinsic value, whether economic value or moral value, whether of goods or of people. Value is subjectively assigned by people, according to the push and pull of their own internal motivations.

So it is meaningless to talk about value without asking: valued by who?

Some people (say, my family) are hugely more "valuable" to me than others.

I'd rather say:

  Life l1, l2; # initialises by default to unique value
  l1 > l2;     # false
  l1 < l2;     # false
  l1 == l2;    # false

All lives should have equal value, maybe.

No lives have different values. Bin Laden != Paul Graham

Except that she's in favor of population control...

Until a profit is to be made...

Yes that's a jab at capitalism and commercial healthcare.