OLPC (One Laptop per Child) wiki

[Christopher Browne]

On 1/16/06, Phillip Qin <Phillip.Qin-szgMhqSEIEG+XT7JhA+gdA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I don't object to any charity work. But I am wondering if so many kids are
> under poverty, no food, no place to live, what's the point we send them
> notebooks? Why don't we just spend this much money helping them surviving
> first?

That's not the point of the exercise.

Children that have neither food nor a place to live will not be going
to a school where they would be getting one of these laptops.

The point of the project isn't to fix poverty, but rather to provide
help to those that are outside that most extreme level of poverty.

Many welfare programs are kind of designed to end as soon as the
immediately perceived disaster has been averted.  But that's only the
beginning, in a sense.  It's not much good if you keep the kids from
starving in the famine if they are still left completely vulnerable to
the next problem that comes along.

The point of the project may not even be to help any sort of "most
impoverished:" if what it *does* do is to expand a "middle class" in
these countries, namely people that are neither the filthy rich
(where, with the high levels of corruption of the third world,
"filthy" is pretty accurate) nor the "dirt poor."

It tends to be from a "middle class" that you see an emergence of
meaningful civil society.  Encouraging THAT may be one of the best
things that can happen for these countries.

This is a bit analagous to the issue of "How can you spend on a space
program when there are homeless in the streets?"; part of the answer
is that there aren't always ways for spending to actually SOLVE the
problems of the homeless.  Another part is that if there are enough
useful spin-offs, sometimes spending money on expensive things can be
a good deal.
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