Aid Notes

The death toll keeps rising in South Asia as The New York Times covers the threats of secondary deaths from disease and unsanitary conditions. This, of course, is the immediate need for relief aid and my understanding is that individual charitable donations are particularly crucial right now, because state-to-state aid money tends to take longer to flow since governments are slow-moving beasts (hence, again, to my mind, the desirability of a well-funded Global Emergency Management Agency of some sort that could act immediately, rather than having all the countries start ponying up money after disaster strikes). On the intergovernmental level, which is typically most important for longer-term recovery rather than immediate relief, the US looks set to become more generous so bully for Bush on that front.

Besided that, a word on the "stingy" issue. What the UN official actually said was that rich countries including the US are stingy with aid money. Whether out of anti-UN malice, or simply demented America-centrism, this has been widely reported as the claim that the United States is stingy which has pissed people off. But no one said that. The US government is stingy with official aid relative to the size of our economy, but the karmic balance is evened by the fact that our citizens are much more generous than the rest of the rich world in terms of individual donations. We also provide some global public goods -- clear shipping lanes and the like -- for self-interested reasons that wind up benefitting everyone. Which isn't to say we shouldn't do more. Indeed, virtually every rich country should do more. We're all stingier than we ought to be, especially in terms of doling out aid that history teaches would be effective like to fight disease and provide clean water in rural areas.