Just heard the Dambiso Moyo argument about aid, yet again. It sounds like a lot of money when we say $1 trillion has been spent on aid over the last 50 years, and ask what we have to show for it.

I’ll be the first to agree that a lot of aid is misspent. But to me, the argument that misspending and unintended consequences are the entire picture of why aid has not achieved its goals is without perspective. The amount of money spent on aid simply isn’t that much for the admittedly overly ambitious goals that have been set. That quoted figure means $20 billion a year. For 1-4 billion people in poverty. That’s really not that much in the scheme of things.

We spend about the same amount ($18 billion) on 77.5 pets yearly and that is only the cost of feeding them, and only the cost numbers for pets in the US. That doesn’t even include healthcare or training for pets. Yes, I am hugely at the risk of inviting arguments about purchasing power from Jason, but will endlessly find any arguments that don’t take into account the gross underspending on aid into account.