Also, alot of this, indeed most of this (i.e., religious charity, university giving, remittance, free trade etc) , is hard if not impossible to measure accurately, but one can get a good enough intuition that the United States significantly surpasses the rest of the world in these categories as well.

I wrote this right after I discussed the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates giving. The Hudson Institue report refuses to give the percentage of GNI comparisons across countries precisely because they are so difficult to quantify. But even then, you can get a feel for how large the United States giving is in those categories compared to other countries (in some cases, it surpasses total government giving of other countries).

As far as remittance goes, you may not classify it as charity but it has a much better track record of actually reaching the poor than any of the other supposed charities. Certainly a much better track record than government to government foreign aid, yet you classify the latter as charity and not the former?

My main point in the preceeding post was the law of diminishing returns. I grant that the United States, as far as direct government aid goes and percentage of GNI, is low compared to other countries. But given the large absolute amount the United States gives, giving much more would only be a complete waste of money. Much better to encourage private giving.

I’ve re-read your comment three times now and I have not been able to find the part where you show a figure representing U.S. private charitable spending as a percentage of GNI. Can you please point me to it? Once you have done that, can you please give comparable figures for other countries? This should be as simple as a table, right?

As for the rest:

1. As I noted before, I think its a huge stretch to characterize remittances as American charitable foreign aid. First, and most obviously, because remittances don’t come from Americans, and second, because they don’t go to charitable causes - just to families. (If remittances are charitable contributions, can immigrants in the U.S. deduct them from their taxes. Nope. I didn’t think so.)

To call remittances a form of charitable foreign aid is really, really stretching the definition.

I’m not even going to entertain the other “charitable” giving that Worstall cites - military bases in Diego Garcia, pharmaceutical research, etc. To describe these things as “charity” is just beyond comprehension.

2. As I’ve noted before, absolute numbers for charitable giving are not meaningful if your goal is to show that the charity of Americans surpasses most other nations - for obvious reasons that I won’t bother to go into.

Yet even with this very large absolute amount of government aid, these still amounts to only 20% of US total foreign aid. The bulk of it, indeed 72% of it, comes from private assistance. As the report states, “U.S. private and voluntary organizations alone gave more to developing countries in 2004 than did the government of Japan. American Universities and colleges gave more to developing countries in foreign scholarships than Australia, Belgium, Ireland, and Switzerland each gave in ODA in 2004. Remittances from immigrants in the United States sent to their families and villages abroad are almost 60 percent of total ODA from all the donor countries”.

This is how Tim Worstall explains the addition,

Looking at the fuller numbers, as this report does, changes the picture a little. The amount that churches and non profits, for example, send is equal to the official number. There is no way that this cannot be considered as aid, as helping countries to develop. The spending by colleges is what they provide in scholarships to students from those poor countries. Education of the poor is typically bandied about as the most important thing we can do for the destitute areas of the world so this must be aid as well….

When we add all of these together we get to some 0.67% of GNI being spent upon alleviating the griefs and sorrows of the destitute in other countries.

Well, actually, not quite so fast. For there are three more things to consider. The first is that line of private capital flows. This is, in fact, the one piece of spending that does more to alleviate poverty than anything else. This might be portfolio investment but most of it is what is known as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and it is this that lifts the poor up by providing them with jobs, a factory to work in, machines to raise their productivity, in short, makes them rich as it did us. Those people sending their hard earned money abroad to invest in sweatshops, for example. The reason the people of Cambodia, Indonesia, Swaziland, flock to these factories is because they get twice the prevailing wage in the wider economy. If you’re going to try and spend money on eradicating poverty, doubling people’s real wages sounds a pretty effective way of doing that.

The second is that portion of US military spending that helps poor countries. Some of this is indirect, like the protection of the sea lanes, the general but unquantifiable benefits that come from having someone acting as a global policeman. There are more direct effects too, like the interventions in Bosnia, the garrisons in the Gulf and at Diego Garcia protecting the flow of oil. Under the rules by which aid is counted these are not to be mentioned, not included in what benefits the US provides.

The third is one that you might find more controversial and I don’t mean to use this as a justification (or condemnation) of the system, just wish to make an observation. The US pays higher prices for pharmaceuticals than most other places in the world and it is those very higher prices that pay for most of the research into new such drugs. At minimum, when such drugs go off patent and begin to be manufactured by the generics companies this benefits the poor world and so the high domestic prices can be seen as a subsidy. What more often happens is that the pharma companies look to the US market to recoup their investments and are willing to sell drugs into the Third World at something closer to marginal cost, again a way of using the US consumer to subsidize the provision of health care in poor places.

His concluding remarks too, which can be found here, are worth reading.

Add to this the Bill Gates foundation and the recent giving of Warren Buffett and you get a very different picture than what is presented by gross government numbers, be they a percent of GNI or absolute numbers. Also, alot of this, indeed most of this (i.e., religious charity, university giving, remittance, free trade etc) , is hard if not impossible to measure accurately, but one can get a good enough intuition that the United States significantly surpasses the rest of the world in these categories as well.

One final point I’d like to make with regard to ‘a percent of GNI’ is that it would be alot more efficient - as far as bang for your buck goes - to solving world poverty for a relatively low contributing country (in absolute terms) like Denmark to raise its percentage of GNI than for the United States to do so. With regard to the United States, the law of diminishing returns matters much more. For example, if Denmark gave twice as much foreign aid, say 4 billion instead of 2 billion, this would mean more, as far as dollar efficiency goes, for solving world poverty than say the United States sending in 40 Billion instead of 20 billion - Would 20 billion more in foreign aid really matter all that much? On the margin, how much poverty would be eliminated for every extra billion? Many who study these things would say not much, see here and here.

Foreign aid has some effect on reducing poverty around the world but after a certain amount it has minimal and may even have a negative affect by increasing corruption and the power of governments that should not be in power. It seems very reasonable to me that that amount would be reached, indeed surpassed, if the United States significantly increased its percentage of GNI of foreign aid (I am of the opinion that the point was reached more than a few billion dollars ago). Much more beneficial than foreign aid, and another area where the United States far surpasses other countries, is in promoting and encouraging free trade and capitalist market reforms, two things that have done more for poverty alleviation than all foreign aid combined - for more on that see here and here.

Fine. Make your case. I’m all ears. Nothing would make me happier than to learn that that is true.

But up until now you haven’t made the case.

You need to show that private contributions per capita, or as percentage of GPI “far surpasses” that of many other countries. It would be best if you could do that by quoting the Hudson Institute report, since that was the original source, but if you need to use another [reputable] source than I don’t see why we can’t accept that.

Go ahead. I would love to be convinced. Really.

So I went to the Hudson Institue report to see if it had any per capita statistics - which, obviously, would be far more interesting. Well… The Hudson report is not nearly so pleasant as HNN painted it. Here’s a sampling:

For many years, U.S. government aid has ranked last among developed countries as a percent of GNI (Gross National Income). The latest data (from 2004) show that the U.S. now ranks second to last, just ahead of Italy. Chart 1 shows that U.S. government aid is 0.17 percent of its GNI, while Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden, and the Netherlands give more than 0.7 percent of their GNI to developing countries.

On a side note, hispanic readers here will be interested to note that the Hudson Institute report has some very positive things to say about remittances from immigrants to their families abroad. This practice has become so widespread that it now constitutes a significant portion of private foreign aid. Although to me it seems a bit strange to include it in that way.