Qom

That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that if you want to help people technological progress will be vastly more efficient than anything else, and particularly aid programs. I don't care about progress for its own sake, nobody does. I'm saying that some people are objectively more valuable than others in the long term and that we should help them instead of helping huge numbers of less productive people. A single great invention could save all those people better than any amount of aid money.

This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry.

What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs.

Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.