Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, calls out Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors for spending time and money on frivolous projects rather than saving the world from economic doom:

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.

…

Today’s crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today’s deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn’t cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

I totally disagree. I’m a firm believer in the “no dollar on the table” principle. If billions could be made by feeding starving Mauritanians, then somebody would be doing it. Idealists like Haque will say that I’m not being creative enough, that surely there’s a “path to radical value creation” that can help the poor and please the shareholders at the same time. Sorry, but it seems that there isn’t.

The reason that people are starving isn’t a lack of innovation and ideas. Take the infamous Haitian mud cakes, for example. It’s terrible and appalling that anyone should be reduced to eating mud. However, it shows that entrepreneurs and innovation abound in even the poorest conditions. And in energy, anyone who can invent a clean renewable energy source that’s cheaper than fossil fuels is going to become a trillionnaire. Suffice to say, people are already working on it.

So rather than blaming Twitter and other frivolous things, how can we fix the economy so that people don’t have to eat mud cakes? If you look at the reasons for rising food prices, many of them can be blamed on economic policies (or a lack of policy). If we really want to help the poor, much more can be done with policy changes than by idealistic hot air aimed at Silicon Valley startups.

(HT: RWW)