This to me points at the flaw of the startup model. Most of the problems startups are solving are not real problems, they don't need solving - but there is money to be made in solving them, so they get solved. This is a problem (lack of jobs/affordable housing) that does need solving, but there isn't much money to be made in it.
And because there isn't much money to be made in it, you really can't make it scale on the back of its own business-model. So there's really nothing a startup can do to help with these problems.
However, I think there's a case to be made that startups can become an important part of solving these problems: they rake in money from wealthy sectors of the population, they're usually quite high-margin, and they are headed by small, smart, effective groups of people, who could make the decision to engage in Effective Altruism with their proceeds.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more for the world's problems than any little start-up aiming to help people track their dogs' sleep-cycles--but it could have been started way earlier, when Microsoft was way smaller, and still be having just as much of an impact--if it had been the whole organization on-board, instead of just a private hobby of the founder.
(Really, any company could join in on this at any point, but the more bureaucratic and self-sustaining the business culture has become--which usually happens proportionally to scale--the less likely it is to happen. Far easier to convince a few guys in their garage that this is their end-goal-after-the-end-goal, rather than to convince a company already making big money that they should reorganize their corporate vision to doing good.)
And because there isn't much money to be made in it, you really can't make it scale on the back of its own business-model. So there's really nothing a startup can do to help with these problems.
Well, there are outfits like YC's Watsi which, while small, are looking to make a difference. And just yesterday the guy behind this said he'd be sending his profits to Watsi:
buy.startupnotes.org
So perhaps there are ways of using the startup mindset to create outfits that can help with social problems.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine a Watsi-esque startup that was an AirBnB for (rigorously screened) homeless people and/or families, i.e. trying to scale what this LA lawyer did (giving his house to a homeless family for a year):
It's not just startups -- businesses tend to focus on earning money. I don't know if we can realistically expect private industry to take an interest in social or economic problems. At the lowest level, there are founders trying to choose a niche that gets them from debt to break-even as quickly as possible; at the highest level, you get into transnational corporations which act only in their own interest.
I would be happy if Apple or Google were to dump their excess billions into social welfare or government reform, but it is vanishingly unlikely.
Many companies choose to make marginally more profit by moving production to 'low cost markets' rather than manufacture here. I believe firmly if you make your product overseas it should cost some amount of money in duty to bring your product back to the United States, ideally about (or maybe more than) the difference in cost between what it would cost to make your product here and what it costs to make it there - is it an easy to implement solution? no. But its the right thing to do.
That said, I believe that rising transport costs will eventually solve this problem for many types of goods, probably within the next 10-15 years or so.
Because I'm selfish. I'm an American, my countrymen are hungry, homeless, and cant find jobs, in a country that is not well accommodating for the poor. I hardly think I can be blamed for wanted to help my countrymen first.
Selfishness is caring about yourself. Caring about people who share your nationality at the expense of others is nationalism, in much the same way that caring about people who share your race at the expense of others is racism.
Give me a break -- that's some nonsense PC excuse to mask a decision purely driven by profit.
If choice of production locations is driven by concern for our brothers and sisters in the developing world, why aren't we making stuff in India? Or Liberia? Or Bolivia? And why are we generally operating in a model that shifts liability for things like pollution and labor problems to local partners?
Choice of production locations is generally driven by actual selfishness rather than nationalism or racism. But actual selfishness can produce good results if things are set up properly. Not so for nationalism or racism.
In short, I believe I need to solve problems near to home before I worry about the rest of the world. There are hundreds of NGO's who worry about Africa and development in the developing world, there isn't really anyone working on poverty here, at home, not with any resources. So I want to work on creating jobs here, here where there are real environmental rules, protections for workers, occupational health and safety rules.
I think it's natural to care about people who are closer to you or more similar to you. But that doesn't make it right, because that exact same tendency is what drives racism. And it's hard to say the moral effects are any different when you compare what poverty looks like in China or Bangladesh to what poverty looks like in America. If you start with the premise that all human life has the same value, then the difference between subsistence farming and a sweatshop job in East Asia is a much bigger improvement than you could ever create in the United States.
This kind of selective altruism, where you care about other Americans so much that you'd make comparatively marginal improvements to their lives instead of making drastic improvements to the life of a foreigner, is the moral equivalent of racism.
