Top of the list of world problems

[Landlord]

Admittedly, that was a smart ass comment.

 

I'm fine with free food to people who can't afford it. I support the local food bank with quite a bit in donations and my family has volunteered there often.

 

When I was thinking about the question, I was thinking more international and many places in the world where there is starvation free food is available if relief was allowed into the country to distribute food.

 

Back to topic:

 

It appears that the main points are

 

Education

Food distribution/supply

Religious conflicts

unstable/unstable governments

 

What should be done about it? Or, is what is being done good enough but these problems will simply always exist?

 

 

They might always exist, but not because they must. These are human created problems - they can be solved problems as well. I think it essentially comes down to how much do we care about 'the world' when it doesn't benefit us?

 

The answer for the last several hundred years, for the most part, has been 'not enough.' People care, just not enough people care deep enough to make big sacrifices towards that goal to actually cause change.

[carlfense]

What should be done about it? Or, is what is being done good enough but these problems will simply always exist?

To some extent I think that they will always exist. That said, do what good you can to whatever extent that you able.

[Cina]

To me, the three biggest problems in the world are the three most important things to combat within each individual.

 

Lack of education or respect for education (ignorance)

Lack of regard for the lives and experiences of others (selfishness)

Lack of self efficacy, lack of belief that you matter and can make a difference (hopelessness)

[EbylHusker]

Education

Overpopulation

Famine/famine prevention/food and water/etc

[tschu]

I think 1. is pretty clearly food/clean water supply and 2. is pretty clearly disease prevention/healthcare. Hugely widespread problems even in developed countries.

 

from there 3. religious/ideological conflicts, 4. Education, 5. slavery/sex slavery, 6. Ed Cunningham, 7. Women's rights

[sd'sker]

ed cunningham, for as annoying as he is, did produce "the king of kong", which is a great documentary. he is a weird guy, basically.

[sd'sker]

Education

Overpopulation

Famine/famine prevention/food and water/etc

i am not so sure i would consider overpopulation as a problem worldwide. it might be a concern, but a lot of the industrialized world is losing population. the other part of the world still rely on big families to maintain self-subsistence.

 

however, i will say a big problem in america is people having children who are not fit (for whatever reason) to raise children.

[tschu]

Education

Overpopulation

Famine/famine prevention/food and water/etc

i am not so sure i would consider overpopulation as a problem worldwide. it might be a concern, but a lot of the industrialized world is losing population. the other part of the world still rely on big families to maintain self-subsistence.

 

however, i will say a big problem in america is people having children who are not fit (for whatever reason) to raise children.

Yep. Once countries reach a certain level of development, the population growth levels off. Poor and undeveloped nations still exhibit huge birth rates. Over the next couple of centuries, the global population change should approach 0.

[tschu]

I find it hard to rank education. On the list of immediate problems it isn't a top concern, but if you only had the ability to fix one problem worldwide, it would clearly be education - that education would lead to the improvement of almost every other problem.

[Cina]

I think 1. is pretty clearly food/clean water supply and 2. is pretty clearly disease prevention/healthcare. Hugely widespread problems even in developed countries.

 

from there 3. religious/ideological conflicts, 4. Education, 5. slavery/sex slavery, 6. Ed Cunningham, 7. Women's rights

 

Women agree.

 

[strigori]

Here's my list, and many of them are very heavily interconnected.

 

1 - Education. The lack of it can often be a root cause of a number of other issues and conflicts. And unfortunately a number of the other factors effect education. Tyrants and religions try to control it for very similar reasons. The poor and stupid are much easier to control and influence.

 

2 - Income inequity. This has many different levels, both in a national sense and a global sense. Nationally economies and long term stability are not helped when the wealth gap is as bad as it is now. And many third world nations make a perfect show of what can happen when a handful of men have almost all the money.

 

3 - Religion. Mainly the radicalization of people, in many different forms. From the obvious of the Muslim terrorists, to the WBC, and the Tea Party. All groups seek to control the rest of the modern population based on their favorite First Century work of fiction.

 

4 - Corporations. Too much power, too much control of aspects of the world in the hands of greedy men who would watch the world burn if it meant growing their profits. Just look at Monsanto for a perfect case study. As it very heavily ties into the next one.

 

5 - Food prices and availability. Also in with this one the continued efforts of the above to hide what they are trying to feed people. Health of people be damned, just put more in the corporate coffers.

[sd'sker]

i always wonder about countries that do not seem to want to be developed. such as papua new guinea. they seem to have a good thing going, but they do not have wealth, world class healthcare, infrastructure, food reserves, etc. when we talk about world poverty, are we also considering tribes that have a good, self-sustaining way of life? it would seem judgmental to assume they are lacking a quality of life because their lifestyles look nothing like ours.

[greenmonkey51]

1. Destruction of the environment.

2. Destruction of the environment.

3. Destruction of the environment.

 

This will be callous but the problems already listed primarily affect only humans. The destruction of the environment also affects the other millions of species on earth. It only took 100 years to destroy a natural experiment that had been running for millions of years.

[EbylHusker]

The vast majority of people in the world are stupid. Not necessarily uneducated, but just f'ing stupid. Too stupid to be allowed to live, imo. That is why overpopulation is there - you can't fix stupid, you can only kill it off.

[EbylHusker]

It only took 100 years to destroy a natural experiment that had been running for millions of years.

Nothing is "destroyed" in the experiment you're talking about. Minus a celestial, or worldwide nuclear, catastrophe on a truly apocalyptic scale, the Earth, and life in general, will go on with or without us. Species come and go all the time through natural means as well as human induced means. I'm not saying environmental protection isn't important, because it is, but claiming that we have somehow destroyed some grand "experiment" on the Earth in a matter of 100 years is so wrong that I'm just not sure what else to say.