Self-Interest and When To Depend On It
You can't depend on other people helping you, if it requires any significant effort. You can generally depend on people trying to help themselves. The optimal result is when people can help others by helping themselves -- or help themselves by helping others.

I bring this up because of a recent Slashdot article. John Dvorak slams the OLPC in an article. Essentially, he says that people in Africa are all starving and will be better helped by $200 worth of rice than a $200 laptop, and that the Internet is useless, anyway, because of spam.

Bullshit.

The United States, Europe, and most other first-world nations have been giving $200 truckloads of rice to Africa for generations. Generations! And, for the most part, it has had no real effect. It's just treating the symptoms, not the problems. In some cases, it has actually caused more problems by destroying local economies.

"What are the problems" is the question that must be asked. I thinkg I have a few answers to that.

1: Lack of infrastructure. In some cases this is roads and hospitals, in some cases this is simply things to provide a viable source of potable water and to provide for basic hygine.

2: Lack of jobs. Whether this is because they practically live in the bush doing subsistance farming or because they live in a ghetto where they go to their sweatshop job every day, they have few options, if any at all. They don't have the skills to do better. Of course, this all ties into:

3: Lack of education. When you have people who don't know any better, things won't improve. When you have people who don't understand how diseases spread, you will never establish hygeine in the population. Even if you see something as a problem, you may not know how to approach it in order to solve it.

4: Misadvantageous society. Some societal traditions destroy people's ability to thrive or better themselves. This ties into 3, above. In some cases the society must be, at some fundamental level, destroyed, because poisoned roots grow poisoned fruits. Is this ethnocentric? Yes. It is also, IMO, true.

Of course, one must also consider that there are effectively several Africas. Most of it isn't like a 1980s aid commercial. Most people aren't having problems getting enough food to survive. The OLPC isn't designed to go to areas where people are simply completely invested in simple survival, and failing. These cancerous areas are those best served by traditional aid.

The OLPC is designed to help people who live in poverty -- that class who're making a few dollars a day, and surviving off of it. See this talk for information on the people of the class that the OLPC is designed to help.

The OLPC can improve places through a combination of exploiting self-interest to improve the lots of others and through providing education and access to the global community. Through those, everything else can follow. Education lets shows you how to build infrastructure and why it's needed. It gives people skills to get better jobs. Exposure to the world community helps dilute and destroy the more maladjusted aspects of a society.

Check out this guy. At 14, he went to a library, studied a book on windmills, and then built his own. (Not only built, but modified the design after testing it.) Look at the windmill. It's built out of garbage. He did this 'cause he wanted light and to power some radios. He's planning on building another to pump water and provide more power. With just a bit of education and self-interest, he's improving the situation for his family and community. Also, he's done something very important: he's shown people that it can be done, and how it can be done can be copied or learned from him. With a farm that's better-irrigated, his family can make more money selling their produce. He could sell windmills to other families, making them more productive.

A lack of ability to communicate makes the small markets in Africa and other places more volatile and less profitable. I recall a news story about how cellphone rental use by microloan businessmen in India had made it possible for small farmers to connect better with buyers to sell their harvest, increasing profits. This talk goes over how fucked up the commodities market is in Ethiopia. I think that you can see how something like common, internet-connected PCs could help establish a less-local commodities market in many places; hell, all you'd need is a webboard for an area where people could post things like "I want Yams!" and "I have Yams!" Of course, this leads to the possibility of having to bring different products to disparate areas in a short time, before they go bad. This leads to the farmer paying some guy to bring his yams to market while he sells his collards or whatever somewhere else (...and he may well pay him in yams.) Look, you've just created not just a job, but, if more people in the area have the same problem, a trade, an industry! As more farmers in the area take advantage of this, they make more money, which they invest into their farms to become more productive, which makes them more money and leads to an even greated demand for a shipping industry, even if it's based on mules pulling carts. This leads to the guy with the mule-cart buying another mule and a cart and employing someone else so that he can deliver more product to more areas. This is a business for her. This is milk for everybody else."

People will improve themselves if they can. One of the easiest ways for people to improve themselves is through access to educational materials. The public library system in the US was vastly successful for this reason. It let people access information when they needed it, on a vast number of subjects. We, in America, have become spoiled; we take the simple and transparent ability to access information for granted. The public library system helped bring us whole generations of engineers, scientists, and writers who otherwise would have been farmers, miners, or factory workers. A library requires a relatively large investment of infrastructure to work, however. You need a big building, you need to fill it with books, and in most places, this place needs heating/AC/dehumidification to preserve the books. A connection to the internet -- doesn't, in comparison.

The educational value of the internet is huge if one is self-directed. You can learn the basics of any science with information available on the internet. (By 'basics', I mean at least to the level of a basic college course.) Of course, that doesn't really help people living in huts.

Okay, then. You can learn how to create a drip-irrigation system, the advantages of crop rotation, animal husbandry, agriculture, etc. You can learn how to identify iron ores, how to smelt them into raw iron, how to forge that into tools. You can learn how to make a way to refrigerate food items with clay, fire, and water. You can learn how to build a windmill. You can learn how diseases spread and how to prevent their spread, how to purify water, and basic sanitation techniques. Poor people learn quickly and are highly motivated. They're more used to 'thinking outside the box,' because they can't afford to live in the box.

Of course, there're problems with the idea. For one, most of the internet is in English. However, as more places come online, they'll create their own content and translate existing content. Access to the information will drive demand for english teachers. And, of course, once people have a basis in a language, they can educate themselves so long as they have a dictionary.

Anyway. While it's no miracle cure, I think that the OLPC could do a lot more for poor people than any amount of foreign aid could. It empowers them directly, allowing them to decide their fates, not some NGO or whatever.