The Transience of Charity

Whoever is the first to get access to mass-produced goods, eventually they becomes accessible to all, because the machines that make them just keep running anyway, and by the time there's no wealthy people left who have need of them, the production cost will have gone down enough that it will still be more profitable to sell them at a lower price than not at all. Perhaps industry is already developing as fast as it can: unequally (starting with the wealthy and finishing with the poor), but still as fast as possible — the machines run as fast as they can, and there's not really any way to speed up the process.
Charity can only reduce inequality in the meantime, but the end result will come just as fast: total development. If anything, charity can make a difference to the end result by determining how many people survive poverty in the meantime, but the more people survive, the longer it'll take for them to have access to basic needs. So charity is really about making a difference in the short-term, not about changing the world: it's about increasing people's quality of life, giving them the support they need to see it through the process of development, not to bring them closer to its conclusion — the investment for that will come anyway, from somewhere or other. The industrialists will always find some buyer for something so high in demand and sell for whatever price they can pay, rather than to go bankrupt. That's why the process happens at a fixed exponential rate.
But we should have the humility to let a short-term difference be enough, even if we can't see the world change and we can't see the people whose lives we affect: just knowing that someone is healthier or happier because of our actions should be enough. But charity needs to be more direct if people's donations are not to get dissipated in logistics.