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Try to imagine the unimaginable. You wake up tomorrow and the electrical grid is not down, but entirely gone. You have no running water. Your shelter is rickety. Your bank accounts have been emptied. You have no access to medical services. Your children can't go to school. Your life expectancy has plummeted.
You would have to think the Apocolypse has come for you. You would be right.
This is reality for many people today, right now.
Over 700 million people (twice the entire population of the United States) live in extreme poverty. Half of the global population (billions of people) lives on less than US$6.85 per person per day.
If we care about anything*, this has to be it.
And please don't tell me that your pet cause is more important because it will impact the world's poor in the future. They are already impacted.
It is not moral or logical to scream for policies that would harm the global poor because you care about the future poor.
Please keep in mind: things were much worse in the past. Rational, practical people working diligently have made incredible progress on lifting people from poverty:
We accomplished this without smashing capitalism or abolishing fossil fuels or undoing globalization. Indeed - without capitalism and oil and globalization, that curve would be much worse. There would be much more suffering.
It is fully possible to make more progress if we actually choose to make progress, rather than actively desiring to impoverish billions.
Don't be swayed by the Doom Cult. Be a part of the solution. Focus on what we can do to help.
* As discussed many places (including the conclusion of "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" from Losing) my focus is on chickens. (That's not going so great.) But humans care most about those closest to them, which, in addition to the reasons I lay out in "Biting," is why I say if there is just one thing to have someone care about, it would be acute human suffering.
Of course, no one should cause active suffering, even if they don't care about chickens or humans.
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