What Should a Billionaire Give - and What Should You?

 

A long and interesting cover story in this weekend's NY Times Magazine.  I certainly agree with his conclusion:

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them — as on present indications we well might — we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.

So why don't good people with oodles of money to spare start writing huge checks to alleviate so much suffering among the world's poor?  One answer is that it's not clear that it would do much good.  The world has poured BILLIONS into fighting poverty in the third world, with painfully little to show for it.  In fact, in many cases, it's done more harm than good by inadvertently propping up despotic governments that are at the root of the suffering.  For more on this, read William Easterly's book, The White Man's Burden.  Maybe I'm letting my hopes supplant reality, but my impression is that the aid community (Western governments, foundations and individuals) appears to be learning from past failures and thus future spending may have greater positive impact...

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What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?

 By PETER SINGER

Published: December 17, 2006, cover story, NY Times Magazine

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html

What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life.