Yup, this was said aroudn 2,000 years ago and while the overall standard of living of the poor has improved, there are still people considered to be living in poverty. Now poverty in rural India is a lot different than poverty in the US or EU - my understanding of poverty in rural India is that it is nearly a foraging existance, subsisting on whatever is handed out or can be found lying around. Money? Not only is there none at all, but there wouldn't really be anything to spend it on either. So it is not a lot different from poverty 2,000 years ago.
The problem is poverty is caused by a number of things and "lack of opportunity" isn't a big one. From what I have seen, in most cases it is a matter of bad choices and uninformed choices. An abject failure to learn is also part of the scenario, in a big way.
In the US it is easy to see people spending $20 on lottery tickets rather than food for the baby when it is pretty clear to them that food for the baby is what is really needed. The result is often begging, borrowing or stealing trying to get the $20 for food for the baby. A few weeks later, the same thing happens again. Sooner or later the friends and relatives figure out it is just a really good idea to become really scarce when their friend or relative is looking for money.
Just making bad choices - partying instead of studying, for example, is enough to screw up people's lives in ways they can't imagine when they are young. Having made some bad choices some folks are able to pull it together and with a lot of drive, determination and ambition actually get somewhere but this is pretty rare. Mostly, the bad choices end up leading to more bad choices and not learning from them instead.
Absolutely, there are rich people that inherited the money and had someone to rescue them every time they screwed up or made a bad choice. But these people are the exception. For the most part they are the end of the line and their children will not be leading privileged lives. There are people that happened to fall into an opportunity and have managed to not screw things up, but again this is rare. Most people with more money and resources than their neighbors simply made better choices, planned for the future and have more determination and ambition.
What all of this means is there is no "solution" to poverty. Right now the US could rearrange things so as to give every single citizen a million dollars. Not counting what this would do to inflation and the economy as a whole, this would in effect eliminate poverty. Right? Except it is pretty much a dead certainty that within ten years there would be people who would have blown through the money and be "poor" again. Maybe as little as five years there would be significant numbers of these people. This would mean the entire exercise - and whatever side effects it would have - would be a waste of time. Which is why nobody seriously proposes doing something like this, at least not anyone with any sense of history and how these things work.
So there is no decision between space and poverty - there isn't anything to be done for "poverty" in a real sense. Oh, I suppose slavery is a solution - you take all the poor people and make them relatively pampered slaves and don't make catching escapees a priority. I am sure this would result in anyone with much ambition escaping but those that did and didn't like it would just come back to be taken care of. It would be a solution, but I don't think it is one that the West has much stomache for. At least not yet. Keep pushing the "fight against poverty" and that is where we will end up in some form or another because it is the only real "solution".
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/EjVvncIvYRs/space-vs-poverty-debate-in-india
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