I had deep thoughts about this question of how to make the world a better place since many years, examining the many problems occuring in the world and how to logically solve them, and I finally came up with a very general solution, that I describe on my web site. Since it is rather abstract and so general, it may take some effort to understand how it would effectively solve many problems.
But before discussing the solution, you may be interested to read this philosophical analysis of the problems to solve, where I define my disagreements with religious concepts, about the question of egoism, and I express some of the fundamental principles on which I develop my liberalism (which may not be exactly the same as the usual ones).
Now, concerning the particular problems you were mentioning: poverty in the 3rd World, here are my thoughts:
First, I would say that poverty has a number of causes and should not be just simply considered as "one problem": people cannot manage to make a good living because many sorts of things are going wrong.
As international market makes prices comparable all over the world, the poverty problem may in large part be summed up by saying "they can't find a good job".
Now, why can't they find a good job. There are different reasons:
- Education
- Genetic causes, as was expressed in the last post
- Malnutrition that weakens them (that is itself caused by poverty)
- Local economic reasons that makes it harder to find a job in a country than in another. These can themselves be divided into several factors.
Concerning local economy of poor countries, one of the main problems is that they don't have the necessary money to invest in business. A solution came out with microcredit and microfinance. But these banks can't be everywhere. My project would include an efficient online monetary system with peer to peer credit, so that it could work wherever there is internet access. You may say it's not yet the case everywhere now, but anyway it will take time to implement, and the hardware of information technology will progress meanwhile.
Other problems may be the administrative formalities and regulations that make it difficult to set up a business. So much that most of the economy there works underground.
Another solution to the local economic problem of employment, is offshoring. This is what brings jobs to where they are most demanded. If offshoring makes a big profit to the companies that operate it while keeping salaries rather low, it's because they are not many enough. If they were manier, then they would compete with each other bringing more jobs to the poor countries, and salaries would grow.
Information technology offers more opportunities for outsourcing, that can be individual in the form of telecommuting. However it would still be hard for a company to have a telecommuting worker in another country, for two reasons. One is the administrative formalities concerning work, its rules and its taxation. As a libertarian, I think those formalities should not exist in the first place. The other reason is the problem of trust towards people only met online. This problem of online trust is the core of what my software project aims to solve. This is such an important problem that it is also the cause why I could not implement my project yet: I had the misfortune to try having it done by programmers that were in fact unreliable.
Another general cause of poverty and unemployment, is the relative lack of capital. Indeed, capital is an important production factor, as appears in the form of the part of capital income with respect to the labor income. The market stability implies that the capital income expresses to how much the production would vary wrt a variation of capital with constant labor, while the labor income expresses how much it would vary wrt a variation of the quantity of work with constant capital. Therefore, the more you observe capital profit and low salaries, the more it means that larger savings would be needed to improve general wealth, and to increase employment and salaries. Of course, saving money appears costly at first, but it is very profitable to all in the long run.
If there was not this nonsense of unfunded redistributive pension systems, then there would be much less poverty in the world.
Concerning the protectionism in agriculture by rich countries, I agree this would be indeed a cause of lack of development of poor countries. I think this requires a little more explanations to be really understood. Namely, saying that agriculture is a traditional activity of poor countries, something that they would naturally be good at, without these barriers. To develop, they would need to sell what they have (agricultural products) in order to buy technology. The artificial reduction of agricultural prices with respect to technological prices on the international market, is an obstacle to their development.
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