"Give a man a fish
and you teach him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he dies of malnutrition because nothing lives in nearby watermasses".

We have a choice in places like Ethiopia; To either be a Deus Ex Machina and sort their problems out without teaching them how to solve them- which doesn't really solve their problems- OR we could mostly keep out of it and let them figure it out, giving them prods in the right direction every so often, and let them either die out (at least until their population can be supported by local methods at a local scale) or grow and adapt and develop.

We fought our way up from their tech level, remember. Because of that we've got sufficient food of a good quality, lots of clean water, decent sanitation, etc. We're doing so well, in fact, that we can support our elderly and vast numbers of people on Benefits- whether they deserve them or not- even with only a slim majority of the population working and a vastly slimmer proportion of the population working on actually keeping us all alive.

What we could do to help would be stop them basing their economies and ways of life around our wants and needs and let them develop on their own. And if we're going to help, we should help using materials they could get their hands on at that time in that local area so that they learn how to do things and gradually build up an understanding of how things happen. Like we did. Maybe keep a covert eye on things and sort out potential troubles (like someone not abdicating when voted out in a democracy could accidentally brutally cut his own throat while shaving).

Meh, that's just my $0.02 on this topic. We did it, why shouldn't they?
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Sat 19 Apr 2008, 19:48, Reply)