Jared Diamond has spent some years researching and documenting the question.

    http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/



On 9/23/07, Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 04:14:52 -0700, Lex Spoon <lex at lexspoon.org> wrote:
>
> > Yes, but the root cause of starvation is a poverty of knowledge.  Food
> > aid helps with immediate crises, but if they are to be prevented in
> > the future, the populace needs to know what is going on.
>
> Actually, I'm prety sure starvation these days is caused by bad politics
> and just plain evil. Not that knowledge doesn't help there, too.
>
> > Further, even leaving aside the possibility of big changes in the
> > local society, better information helps in more immediate ways.  If a
> > person checks out wikipedia and learns about germs, their life will
> > get much better.
>
> I'm not particularly prepared to debate it (and it's not really
> appropriate here), as the closest I've come to starvation is a 4-day fast,
> undertaken as a sort of experiment.
>
> My main point is that I'm quite positive the OLPC crowd has researched the
> topic better than those of us who are casually monitoring the process.
>
>