Poverty isn't just a socioeconomic state, it's also a state of mind. And when tasked with making important decisions on a shoestring budget, your brain will sabotage your wallet.

Development wonks want entrepreneurs trying to start a new age of space exploration to abandon their effort and throw good money after bad at the developing world.

There's a good case for trying to bring the developing world online, but it's going to be hard to get today's financial gatekeepers to sign on to such a project.

Today, extreme poverty is not an issue of insufficient resources, but of politics and allocation. And that makes it much harder to address.