From: Technotranscendence (neptune@superlink.net)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 05:04:58 MDT
On Monday, August 11, 2003 3:02 AM Amara Graps amara@amara.com wrote:
> The CGD index is a crude first stab at
> measuring the rich world's help for the
> poor and the authors themselves admit
> that it has many flaws, but it is a good
> first step that emphasizes that aid alone
> is a misleading guide; trade and peace
> matter at least as much.
No time to read the article right now, but even aside from your great
point here, wouldn't another gauge of helping others be the results? In
other words, if X gives away a higher %age of its wealth to charity than
Y, but X gives to charities that actually make people worse off than Y,
then Y might actually be helping things out more than X is. (Trade and
peace have much better results, I bet, than international welfare. I
would also note that a lot of foreign aid is actually internal
redistribution. For instance, the aid from the US to Iraq is being
gobbled up by US contractors. This is not unique to the Iraq War. The
same thing happened in the Balkans. I bet it happens elsewhere too and
with other donor nations.)
Later!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Aug 11 2003 - 05:01:15 MDT