Comment by glesica

I think that when people say "hard problems" they mean "problems that almost certainly have solutions if you are willing to put in the effort". Poverty on the other hand is a much, much harder problem than that. In fact, no one quite knows how to solve it in a general way (there are things that seem to work in certain contexts but not in others, many special case half-solutions). And on top of that, there probably isn't a clear path between solving the poverty problem and wealth the way there is between solving the {photo sharing, social media, web search, ...} problem and wealth.