H.G. Wells For Prescient?
As for poverty, giving someone something that they'll turn around and waste never helps. It just teaches them that they can get free stuff to waste.
Teaching them how NOT to waste... That's a difficult solution tho, and really beyond a lot of the socially conscious folks out there, who find it much easier to just confiscate money at gunpoint from part of the population to give it to the part of the population who thinks that sugary cereal, potato chips (with dip), sugar soda, and frozen pizzas are a balanced diet.
Where I used to work, we had a janitorial staff that was 99% Bosnian immigrants. Those folks would work. Everything was nice. All the time. Hire folks off the welfare rolls, however, and you'd have bad ugliness. Oh, and some of the "janitors" were making some serious bucks, because they volunteered to go to school for hazmat and cleanroom stuff...