foreign aid factoids

My bro and sis-in-law recently gave me a lovely boxed version of The New Yorker on CD-- every issue and article that has ever come out since the 1920s. This of course is tens of thousands of articles and I will never come close to reading them all-- but tonight, as I am getting ready to go to Nigeria in a week, I decided to search for articles on Nigeria. Which brought up some interesting stuff, as these factoids from a 2000 article about the famous meeting between Bono and Jesse Helms. (Before the serious stuff, I just have to share the NY's rich little description of "Helms, whose enthusiasm for mononymic rock stars had hitherto passed unremarked". Ha!)

But here's the important bit:

In 1962, roughly three percent of the federal budget was devoted to development aid. This year, the share going to economic aid for poor countries is less than one percent, which is just twenty-nine dollars per American. (The typical developed country gives about seventy dollars per person.) The entire aid budget for sub-Saharan Africa would just about pay for one new destroyer.

--"Comment: They Are the World", John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 9 October 2000
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