Many love to say how fixing poverty is a simple matter of reallocation. It is not. It is better to make a richer world than to redistribute, the socialist ideal, and make us all equally poor.
Teach a (wo)man to fish
The future is one of low-cost technology. Computational power increases 10,000 times each decade. This means that in 20 years we will have systems more than 100 million times more powerful than we have now (and hence be able to run Windows 10 without it crashing).
This also comes to cost.
The systems we have now will decrease in cost. There are already plans to create tablets (or augmented systems) that will translate to any of 3,000 languages, act on voice (to aid those who are illiterate), and work visually. In coming years, such a system will be cost-effective enough to distribute to all people on the globe. This is not a far-off SciFi issue, but one that will become a reality within 10–20 years.
This is a platform for education too. What we need to do is to start developing courses and means to educate LARGE numbers of people at once. Udemy is one of these. The Khan Academy is another.
Food
Many will argue that these people are starving, but the truth of the matter is to ask WHY these people are starving. They cannot earn a living. They have repressive governments. That is why we have poor. What is needed is not knowledge so that people know the issues with their own political situation, but a means to earn from any location globally. This is not too far from us.
As for food, the earth has the ability to produce enough food to feed a population 10 times the size we have now (and more potentially). Food itself is not the issue. Access to food is.
If people are free, and they have a means to earn, then they have food. This is the answer to poverty. Easy said, but never easy to achieve.
- The problem: too many people oppose it.
- Too many people want this to fail.
- Too many people who argue good create poverty through their words and actions.
Education will be opened not through redistribution, but capitalism.