[whack]

Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world. Not to mention a sizable sub-segment that has no interest in providing aid even to their fellow citizens, who happen to check a different demographic box.

The US government can put Sergey to shame... if it wanted to. But it's unlikely that it will anytime soon.

[adventured]

> Unfortunately, we are living in an era of "America First" where a vast segment of the population has no interest in engaging with or providing aid to the rest of the world.

Little has changed about the US foreign aid budget in the last several years, despite your attempted pitch. The foreign aid budget has not been slashed, the US is still spending around ~1% of its budget on foreign aid, the same level it was spending under Obama.

Here are the foreign aid disbursement numbers by year:

2012: $46b, 2013: $46b, 2014: $41b, 2015: $48b, 2016: $47b, 2017: $45b, 2018: $46b, and 2019 disbursement figures are partial in the foreign aid explorer.

Mostly the US is failing to boost its foreign aid. Trump doesn't control the US budget (he has some limited influence) and there is a split power situation in the US Congress.

The US still provides approximately 1/2 of all global food aid, and has been doing that for a century. The US typically provides 300% more global food aid in a given year than all of Europe combined for example.

4% of the world's population, providing 50%+ of the world's food aid. Those selfish Americans, routinely saving the world from famines and hunger for a century and saving tens of millions (not a typo) of lives in the process.

"The United States is, by far, the world’s largest international food-aid donor. Almost every year since the 1950s, it has been responsible for more than 50 percent of the billions of tons of food shipped from the parts of the world with a surplus to the parts of the world that are hungry."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/how-the-u...

The US is also still keeping millions of people alive in Africa that have HIV/AIDS, courtesy of PEPFAR.

[chmod775]

>1/2 of all global food aid

You're just cherry picking numbers.

The US has a pretty high per capita amount of arable land among western countries. It's not surprising they'd provide a lot of food aid.

But there's more to foreign aid than providing food. An actually useful metric is looking at per-capita spending on combined foreign aid, which solidly puts the US ($95.52) behind Canada ($122.04), Germany ($214.73), the UK ($284.85), and obviously behind top-spenders such as Norway ($812.58), Sweden ($701.10), Luxembourg ($609.48), etc.

It also puts them behind the EU: The total spending of the EU was $73.80 billion from member states and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...

Food is obviously one of the most important ways of providing foreign aid combating an immediate problem, and it's great the US are using their geography to help out, but it's not exactly fair to pretend others aren't contributing.

[jtbayly]

> and $13.85 billion from EU institutions, which works out to $196.5 per capita.

And what about US institutions, such as the one this article is about? Seems like you are doing your own cherry picking.

[chmod775]

> And what about US institutions

They're already included in the US number. In fact they are the US number.

Due to the greater autonomy of EU member states their individual contributions and those done by EU institutions (meaning those institutions not belonging to a specific member state) were kept separate in the above link.

It's possible the word "institution" doesn't mean what you think it means.

[jtbayly]

I don’t know the ins and outs of this. Just answer this question for me. Do any of the numbers you cite include donations by organizations such as the ones described in the article?

If not, then it’s not a very helpful metric since huge amounts of aid aren’t being measured.