Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Nicholas Kristof makes a couple of interesting points in his column toady http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/opini ... oref=login; one, that yes, Americans are stingy when it comes to charity:

Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times that on soft drinks daily.

In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, we increased such assistance by one-fifth, for President Bush has actually been much better about helping poor countries than President Clinton was. But as a share of our economy, our contribution still left us ranked dead last among 22 top donor countries.

We gave 15 cents for every $100 of national income to poor countries. Denmark gave 84 cents, the Netherlands gave 80 cents, Belgium gave 60 cents, France gave 41 cents, and Greece gave 21 cents (that was the lowest share, beside our own).

It is sometimes said that Americans make up for low official aid with private charitable donations. Nope. By OECD calculations, private donations add 6 cents a day to the official U.S. figure - meaning that we still give only 21 cents a day per person.

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Well, that does seem to be in keeping with our professed christian moral values. My memory is a little rusty, and I may be paraphrasing here, but did not Jesus sayeth in the Gospels, shrugging his shoulders: "The poor - fuck 'em."

And Kristoff also reiterates the point Knip made here, that while the tsunami is tragic, the world is full of tragedy that we just ignore, even though much (or at least some) of this suffering could be alleviated with a little compassion and charity:

The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the margin of error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria. Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them children and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million - we don't even know.

But the bottom line is that this month and every month, more people will die of malaria (165,000 or more) and AIDS (240,000) than died in the tsunamis, and almost as many will die because of diarrhea ( 140,000).

many will counter the per capita argument by saying it doesn't include america's contributions through its military...for instance, of course denmark provides more per capita when they provide so little militarily...

personally, i believe the argument has some merit, but is also fraught with error...for instance, although the cost of having troops in asia to help with the aid effort should certainly be included in terms of overall aid, i don't necessarily believe the costs in iraq really count towards that end, although many will say they should...the US also supports the UN through megabucks, so that should probably be counted too

the other part of the discussion speaks to what the expectations should be...should a country with double the GNP per capita of another country be giving twice as much, or is there a threshhold, and maybe the figure is 10 times as much...

i don't know the answers...but i do know the subject is more complex than comparing per capita aid donations between countries