Who is better at helping the poor? Capitalist vs. government agency?

Here is a real life example of how a "greedy" capitalist really helps people. He manufactures something others want, and are happy to pay for, because it makes their lives better. At the bottom of the quoted text, you will see what happens when the World Bank tries to help. Yep, makes things worse.

If necessity is the mother of invention, Paul Polak is one of its fathers.


For 30 years Dr. Polak, a 78-year-old former psychiatrist, has focused on creating devices that will improve the lives of 2.6 billion people living on less than $2 a day. But, he insists, they must be so cheap and effective that the poor will actually buy them, since charity disappears when donors find new causes.


His greatest success has been a treadle pump that lets farmers raise groundwater in the dry season, when crops fetch more money. He has sold more than two million, he said.


He also helped develop a $25 artificial knee and a $400 hospital lamp to save newborns with life-threatening jaundice.


...the treadle pump. It was brilliantly simple, it could be manufactured by local workshops, and a local driller could dig a 40-foot well and install it for $25. Studies showed that farmers made $100 in one season on that investment.

Retails for $25 US. Farmer can profit $100 in a season.

We talked to 75 little welding shops where they make things like bedsprings, and jawboned them into making treadle pumps.


As we were developing our pump, the World Bank was subsidizing deep-well diesel pumps that could cover 40 acres. The theory was that you’d get a macroeconomic benefit, but it was also very destructive to social justice. The big pumps were handed out by government agents; the government agent was bribeable. The pump would go to the biggest landholder, and he’d become a waterlord.


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