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ben_wyesterday at 10:35 PM1 replyview on HN

How, or when?

How is a lot of things, including the rich paying for it to be eliminated even in the poor nations who had no strong government to do this themselves.

When is where: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/many-people-alive-t...


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roughlyyesterday at 11:28 PM

Yeah, to shortcut the debate here, I think the crux of the argument is that, starting in the 80s, the capital & tech sets both started pointing to things like the smallpox vaccine and the green revolution and saying "See? This is why you need to get out of our way and just let us do our thing," whereas the rest of the world has been saying "the only reason any of that worked is because we built the social and political systems during the 50s, 60s, and 70s to get those solutions into the hands of the people." The argument to ignore the social, economic, and political effects of technology because eventually it makes the world better ignores the process by which it eventually makes the world better, and also ignores that it does not de-facto make the world better without those social and political processes. Technology should be encouraged, and also when you look around and see people starving or dying from preventable diseases while billionaires shoot people into space for the hell of it, the balance is off.

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