A billion pounds?

[ciphergoth]

babysimon: "You could do a lot of good with £1bn"

How would you spend a billion pounds in order to do good? You can't spend it on yourself or your friends.

Comments

[nickys.livejournal.com]

""The money required to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world has been estimated at $17 billion a year."

... so, with the current exchange rate, around 8 of us could agree too pool our billions and solve just about every serious problem there is.


Seems vaguely plausible that everyone on the planet could have clean, safe water for around £1 billion, so I'd go for that.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Where does that statistic come from?

$17bn a year is different from $17bn capital, but it's still less than 1% of UK GDP. I can't understand how it could be that cheap and not be done yet.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I can't find a proper cite, but this guy claims to have been the first to say it ... and from the rest of the page he doesn't seem to be the most credible source.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

He does seem quite mad. Also, looking at this, which looks rather more reputable charitable giving for overseas causes from the UK and US alone comes to 0.13*0.0073*2398 + 0.03*0.0167*13194 = $9bn, so with fairly conservative assumptions about the rest of the western world we're already putting more than $17bn towards it and it's not solved yet.


(GDP figures from wikipeda, calculation is "proportion of aid sent overseas" * "charitable give as proportion of GDP" * GDP)

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Well, the calculation for aid tends to include stuff like money given to regimes to do stuff that involves paying British and US companies to do things at 20x the price that a local contractor could do them for...

... and tax rebates given to companies which donate things to the Third World, whether or not the things donated are actually useful...

[nickys.livejournal.com]

I think the original calculation was done by WHO, though it was back in the 1980s.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> I can't understand how it could be that cheap and not be done yet.

You and me both. :-(


Though you'll recall that prior to the landmine (partial) ban there were a lot of vested interests in and around government claiming "The issues are complex and we shouldn't rush into anything..."

And any suggestion to increase NHS funding always gets a variation on "We could do more, but where would it stop?"

So I'm guessing it'll be something like that.
My best guess is that our economic model is partially based on having cheap labour abroad and that improving people's living conditions and (especially) education gives them options other than to be cheap labour.