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

[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...