[extropy-chat] Still Stingy

[Samantha Atkins]

I reject the fundamental premise  that one is morally obligated to help 
persons one does not know in any and all difficulties.   However, you 
make a quite good point that we do not adequately support research into 
real killers that we can do something about before the fact.  I would 
not call this "stingy" so much as irrational.

-s

On Jan 4, 2005, at 10:19 PM, Olga Bourlin wrote:

> I wonder how much more (or how much less?) would people voluntarily 
> donate
> if the USA didn't collect any taxes at all?  (Sometimes I just hate to 
> think
> ...).
>
> "The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the 
> margin of
> error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria.
> Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them 
> children
> and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million - we don't even know.
>
> But the bottom line is that this month and every month, more people 
> will die
> of malaria (165,000 or more) and AIDS (240,000) than died in the 
> tsunamis,
> and almost as many will die because of diarrhea ( 140,000).
>
> And that's where we're stingy.
>
> Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development
> assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times 
> that on
> soft drinks daily."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/opinion/05kris.html?oref=login&hp
>
> Olga
>
>
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