I most emphatically do not believe that throwing money at a problem will fix it in the general case, msmith. I thought that much was clear.
Guinistasia: The argument isn’t that the poor are lazy or undeserving, but more pragmatic: If you reward something, you tend to get more of it. That was always the argument for welfare reform, not that the people were unworthy.
And it’s absolutely true. If you give someone money because they are poor, you have rewarded them for being in that condition, or at least watered down the incentive to leave that condition. That means you will have more poor people a year later than you would have had if you had done nothing.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to money spent helping someone change their condition (i.e. education, building infrastructure, etc). But if you just hand out cheques to poor people, you’ll get more poor people, or the decrease in the number of poor people will be slower than if you didn’t.
There is no particular reason why things like good government, free trade and economic growth have to exclude more international aid.
For one thing economic growth is a long-run phenomenon and will improve living standards in a few decades. What do you do in the meantime to help hundreds of millons of people who are literally on the verge of starvation and crippling disease. There is no substitute in the short run for increasing international aid which will help many of them at relatively little cost to Western economies.
More important in the long run is that international aid used correctly can actually help the process of improving the quality of government and economic growth. For one thing it can be used as a lever to induce government to pursue more efficient economic policies. For another it can be crucial in development projects which cannot be easily done in the market because of imperfect capital markets and other market failures but which increase economic growth. A good example is something like developing vaccines for tropical diseases (or AIDS) which affect working age population. Clearly effective vaccines for such will have a tremendous effect on labour productivity but for various reasons aren’t produced in adequate quantity by the market. The Gates Foundation is doing tremendous work in this area but there is no reason why its work can’t be supplemented by government funds. Similarly projects in areas like primary education can actually help bring about the social and political conditions which will produce long-run growth.
An example of an international development project which has had tremendous benefits for poor countries would be the development of better seeds in the 60’s by researchers at various foundations with both public and private charitable money which triggered the Green Revolution which made large parts of the developing world food-sufficient for the first time and may have saved hundreds of millions of lives in the last 4 decades.
Oh and btw, among the American public there appears to be an absurd belief that aid to poor countries is a major part of the budget and that the American government is an extremely generous contributor. In reality the American govenrment gives about 5 billions dollars a year to poor countries which is less than 0.05% of its economy and is significantly less than other major Western countries. Interestingly enough when they were asked what would be a reasonable percentage to devote to international aid it was several times what the US actually gives.
Yeah, yeah, such a small amount, five billion dollars is. Quite honestly I don’t see that comparing what one country contribues versus what another contributes is really a meaningful comparison to make, but that is often frowned upon for no reason I can see. I thought we agreed not to throw money at the problem? 
I suspect this $5 billion figure may not include money that aids poor countries via outside organizations, such as United Nations dues, costs of U.N. peace-keeping operations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank assessments, etc.
Well add a couple of billion for money to international agencies and the basic point is still the same; not to mention the fact that the US has to be dragged kicking and screaming before it pays its UN dues anyway.
And yes 5 billion is a pitiful amount in comparison to the US economy and in comparison to the problems that poor countries face and when you consider the enormous good that relatively small amounts of money can do when it comes to saving lives in poor countries.
And don’t forget the long-term benefits to the US itself. If aid is used effectively it helps builds the kinds of societies which will then provide opportunities for Americans to invest in , to trade with, to travel to and which are less likely to be the kind of failed states like Afghanistan which are havens for terrorists,organized criminals and the like. Not to mention the pshychic benefit of not having to see pictures of starving,diseased people on our TV screens every so often.
CyberPundit, are you suggesting we adopt a televangelist model and give until it hurts or what? If we always throw money at countries that hate us we’re gonna have a lot of countries that hate us for no other reason than it is profitable to do so.
The U.S. is currently spending 1 billion dollars a DAY to eliminate a worldwide terrorist threat. How does that factor into the calculation?
How about the maintenance of a huge nuclear arsenal that kept world peace for 50 years? Do they get some credit for that? No. And not only does America fail to get credit for protecting the free world, but the very people who had the most to gain from an American military (Europeans) spent much of that time looking down their noses at the United States and marching in the streets to show how much they disliked the U.S. and everything it stood for. But as Kipling said, "It’s ‘Tommy This’, and ‘Tommy that’, and ‘Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?’, but it’s the ‘thin red line o’ heroes, when the drums begin to roll’.
As a Canadian, I recognize that I live in a free, peaceful world largely because I live under an umbrella of protection that I didn’t pay for. You Americans paid for it. That’s one reason I get annoyed with people who consistently diss America because it doesn’t ‘give’ enough.
It is a small amount when you compare it to a deficit of six trillion, no?
Yes, it is Guin, and the amount of money I pay on food conspumption is much smaller than the amount I spend on my car. The point being?
Erislover,
“give till it hurts”? Hardly. The US could increase its aid tenfold and it would still be only about 0.5% of GDP which would barely affect its standard of living or growth. Not to mention that there will be a signficant long run payoff to the US if it promotes development around the world.
And it’s not a matter of “throwing money” at countries who hate the US; but a matter of funding specific,useful development projects all over the poor world. In fact the threat of cutting off aid would be a powerful inducement to cooperation in matters like terrorism.
Sam Stone,
The current war and the nuclear arsenal are there to protect US interests and citizens not out of altruism for the rest of the world. This is so even if these things benefit other countries as well. Even if the US didn’t give two hoots for non-Americans it would still be fighting this war.
Let me add this (which I should have put in my OP, but didn’t for some stupid reason): We currently have an example of what can happen when a Third World nation is largely ignored by the First World nations. Bin Laden isn’t hiding out in downtown Manhatten (though he should, after all, who would look for him there?) and it wasn’t a First World nation he used for his base of operations. He camped out in Afghanistan because he could use the beliefs of those in the country to further his plans for world domination (Come on, you don’t really think that he’d be satisfied with just control of the Mid-East do you? Or that Hitler would have stopped with control of the USSR?), and since the people were poor and impoverished and he no doubt threw money around like it was water (remember the Afghan currency is worth something like 1/40000th of a dollar), so he was seen as a way out of the crushing poverty most Afghans are suffering from. Hitler came to power when Germany was nearly in as bad a situation. It seems to me that if the disparity between First and Third World nations is allowed to continue, that sooner or later we’ll have some other nutbag with money to burn trying to take on the US. And next time we might not be as lucky as we were this time. (And to forestall the wag who wants to be “cute” and question my use of the word “lucky,” remember, most people escaped from the WTC and Pentagon alive. The same could not be said of those down river if a nut sets off a small nuke at Hoover Dam.)
Most of the land area required by a coal plant is taken up by the coal yard and unloading facilities, coal piles, and rail yards (if used). As such, one could expect a range of coal plant sizes to be from 500 acres to 1000 acres, but typically they buy lots of extra land for expansion, ash ponds, scrubber sludge ponds, etc. Thus, if you have three ash/sludge ponds, and some border area, you can be as large as 5,000 acres for the plant.
As for the mine? I guess you are talking open-pit or a strip mine. I don’t have any good figures right now, but the PRB open pit mines of Wyoming have a huge energy density, with coal seams that are more than a hundred feet high. Thus, they have an enormous amount of energy per area - I’ll see if I can find areas, but I’m not seeing anything in what I have handy.