Things Beware The Carpenter does not understand · 3:24pm May 25th, 2014
I live in Australia; here, the Australian Guide Dogs Foundation is a very popular charity.
It costs about $30,000 to train one guide dog.
4 out of 5 of people who are blind in the world don’t need to be and about half of them could have their eyesight restored through a simple cataract operation which, through the charity The Fred Hollows Foundation costs about $25.
I do not understand why people regularly contribute money for guide dogs when the price of one dog could restore sight to 1,200 people.
I have done an enormous amount of research on various charities, and if you work through an efficient one, you can usually provide the tools to help one person sustainably escape poverty for about $50-$70.
If I were to put up a picture of one little kid with cancer and say this kid dreams of being a music star but is dying of cancer unless we can raise $80,000 for his cancer treatment; there’s a good chance that you would donate something, even though you knew that that same price could help over a thousand people sustainably escape poverty.
Around 22,000 children die every day from starvation and easily preventable diseases. This rarely gets any media attention.
If one person gets lost hiking in the woods; the government spends tens of thousands of dollars searching for them and anyone who argued that the lost hiker’s life wasn’t worth it would be considered a monster.
If there’s a mine cave-in and thirty-three miners get trapped in Chille; the world watches and applauds as around $30,000,000 is spent or donated to rescue them.
If one plane with 300 people on it goes missing over the Indian Ocean; it is news for weeks, and even after any hope of recovering living passengers has gone, international governments continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars searching for their corpses.
If three planes crash into two sky scrapers and the Pentagon, killing just under 3,000 people in 9/11; it’s treated as a global catastrophe and more than a decade later, people talk about the horrific loss of life.
Meanwhile; 22,000 children die every single day from starvation and easily preventable diseases.
These are things Beware The Carpenter does not understand.
Inefficiency has been the result of a lack of unity within global politics. The same reason that most of the economies in the world are currently on the decline despite our technological improvements to increase production is again stated.
Do you remember when mankind realized that wars could no longer be fought in straight lines without them being mercilessly slaughtered? It took a couple centuries for us to really learn that fact despite the obvious flaw in the system. The same could be said for production, allocation of resources, and general economic policy. The bottom line is that man is slow to learn.